Blue Fish Archives ~ DeadPhoenX's Old Gallery Site

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Thanks to the efforts of Orpheus, Greece is finally at peace, and his beloved Helene has been rescued from the clutches of the evil Hades.

Self Critique: The rendering of the dress on the clothed version is not quite the best. I should've made the foot on the ground just a tiny bit longer as it kinda looks too small. Shoulders are kinda on the broad side (then again, I'm not sure how else it should've been drawn as she's meant to be holding herself up on the boulder). Sunrays are jank.

It's been 9 months in the making, But she's finally done. Here's Helene from the NES game The Battle of Olympus. I've actually had some experience with this game as it's one of the last games I bought from my local Game Champ before they closed for good around the early 2010s. Before that, I came across the title screen theme, The Theme of Helene (also called the Nymph's Theme, or just The Battle of Olympus). The theme stuck with me, as I consider it one of the best NES themes of all time. I sadly never got around to beating this game when I bought it back then. But the little bit I did play made for some nice game playing nights. I did kinda spoil the ending when I saw the final battle and the revelation of Helene on Youtube. But hey, if it weren't for that, I wouldn't have drawn what you're seeing today!

Speaking of, lets get to that. The scenery of course is a recreation of the title screen, more specifically the ending version where you see Orpheus and Helene looking over the building as the sun is rising. Due to the limitations of the NES, there wasn't much to put into that scene besides putting them two to the side and making it look like they were far away. And so that's where I would start. First, I'd make a pose with my Body-Chan model, resting her on a crumpled piece of paper that acted as the boulder. You can see the behind-the-scenes of this over on my Twitter. The next part was a doozy: the coloration of Helene's outfit. On the revelation screen (bottom of linked page), everything she wore was white. But then on the next screen, her leaf crown turns green, most likely a result of the color limitations of the NES – especially for a scene that transitions from night to morning like it does in the ending. And with no official art to go by, I settled on doing some interpretations. First, I made the leaf crown gold and the wrappings of her dress gold as well. I kept the straps of the sandals white but added the gold part on the bottom for style. Also added some jewelry on her as well.

The background was another thing I had to re-interpret while still sticking to what the NES had. The structure was on top of a cliff. But if the ending is to be believed, the cliff was also a path... which didn't look right. So I kept the structure, its stairs, and the cliff. But everything else I added in to give that structure distance and scale, like the pathway leading up to it. The plant-life was added in midway to not make the place look so dead. I wasn't sure if to simply have dead branches since, if the ending is to be believed again, this place was a dungeon that Helene was held in. Thus it would've just looked weird having a pretty lady in a dead environment. So for the sake of making the scenery look nice, I added the leaves in. I also added some overgrowth and moss to at least make it look like barely around here really cares to maintain this area. The roses were added as well since I would assume the further away the plants are from the dungeon, they nicer they would be. The light filtering I replicated from the Shampoo pic I did last year with the light source being behind the model, this time with better success. Also borrowed some of that light-around-the-eyes thing I did with Xiuying's Summer pic that I did last year.

Overall, this came out great. I had my doubts with the cards I was given. But I made it all work out in the end! Oh yeah, and this is the first pic I did with my new Cintiq 16! I'll explain more about that on my Patreon/DeviantArt soon.

Done on Clip Studio Paint Pro. Cintiq 16 Tablet used. Body-Chan Model traced for schematic skeleton, then drawn freehand the rest of the way.

Helene, The Battle of Olympus is (c) Infinity, Imagineer, Brøderbund.

Frozen Shade (aka Frozen Half), and Castlevania series (c) Konami.
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