Purple-haired Girl

I haven't submitted a deviantation in a while.

Although I'm not using it yet, I have a new laptop. The reason I'm not using it yet is because it runs Vista and I can't stand Vista now. Until we get my sister's boyfriend to install XP from a cd (he's techsavvy and is really level-headed. You could have a virus on your computer and he stays calm. He only gets pissed at my sister)

So anyway, this picture I really worked hard on. I wanted to see how good I could work with the more painted style without using any blending tools to make it too refined. I used almost no references. I only needed a picture of an evergreen tree because I never painted one successfully but I think I may have finally mastered painting them. I spent a lot of time on the deciduous tree to the right and it looks like it came right out of an anime. I used the background forest trick where you just use a few shades of green to indicate a thick forest in the background. And the sky. No I didn't forget to do it. I decided that I wanted an overcast sky because the blue sky with clouds is a bit overdone.

I learned a few texture tricks in this picture. The hair has an odd shine to it since I used the same method I use when I do my fancy pictures. I colored all soft but then went over some areas with a hard cel setting to make it not all look like an N64 graphic (all blurry and ill-defined) and it did the trick.
The blue collar with the slight purple tint kind of makes it look irredescent. The collar almost looks like it was made out of water-proof nylon. The white parts seem to indicate two textures. The shirt itself where the breasts are shaded seems to look like worn metal surface like you'd find on a counter. The stripes on the collar look like they were done with really shiny ribbon.

Overall, I'm happy with how this picture came out and I'm glad that I didn't even use the eye-dropper tool. All these colors were picked by myself



Now that I look at the picture, I realize that the only colorful parts are the girl's hair, her hairband, her skin, and her eyes. That's sort of good because colorful parts always attract the eye.


In other words, this picture is completely mine. I didn't trace (I almost never trace, except when I do vectors). I tried to fit detail into places I'd normally skimp on. And it only took me 2-3 days to do this picture. I hear some people spend weeks on pictures and I admire their determination but I just like to get stuff over with because I can procrastinate badly.

And the uniform is not meant to be influenced by Haruhi Suzumiya's. It's actually inspired by a bathrobe with a sailor influence to it that I recently bought. I thought it'd make a kickass costume. I inverted the collar colors here though.