FArt War 2010 Feb Pinup

My entry for the February FArt (Fan Art) war 2010 over on the City Of Heroes bulletin Board.

February's theme is the Pin-UP

So here's mine: A page from the (fictional) "Girls of the Zig" calendar. February is for Brutal Wendy!

Added Feb 20 ~ 02:30 pm: Just thought I'd add a little more information, in case anyone's interested.

The Texture for the back and side walls is from a screen shot I took in-game. When you build a new villain in City Of Villains, you start out in the tutorial, during a breakout in the Zig (big prison). I ran my character around and took screen caps of the inside of the cells. I got a *mostly* straight-on shot of the wall, and some others of the few furnishings. I cropped as much of the wall texture as I could get, pulled it into Photoshop & sized it up a bit. I copied it, then I used the edit->transform->perspective to make it match the perspective of the wall in my drawing. Then I did that for the side wall with the copy I made. I may have blurred them a tiny bit.

I couldn't do the exact same thing for the floor, because I couldn't get anywhere near a straight-on shot, plus there's the raised-tiles and the little bugs crawling around. I clipped a chunk, enlarged it, did *some* skewing (edit->transform->skew), and then blurred it a lot. A lot. Then copied that texture+layer, and threw the artistic->sponge filter on it. I dropped the opacity on it a little, and merged its layer with the unfiltered one. I did a little low-opacity clone-stamping to cover the tile-lines that were still visible. Then I drew my own lines for squares on a new layer over it (had to do some quick-n-dirty pespective guidelines and cut it into squares so they'd look right).

I imported the screenshots into ps so that I could ink-dropper pick-up the colors from them to use in my pic (bed frame, costume, skin, etc.). I did a lot of Dodge & Burn tool stuff, but also some color choosing and straight painting, with blur tool to smooth it. I also used adjustment layers and masks to get some of the shadow effects, Burn tool on others.

Yes, there were lots of layers, and lots of careful layer merging at the end!

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the overall image. Yeah, there's plenty that I need to work to do better next time. (I didn't even get to really do much with the hair. Its supposed to be dreadlocks!)