A Warm Bath With Mei
No-Glasses variant after the break.
After a hard day’s work Overwatch’ing, a warm bath can help cool things down.
Self Critique: Regarding Mei herself, the area around her shoulder blade could’ve had better shading. On Snowball, the perspective of the winch holding up the flap to our right is kinda fucked. Kinda wish I found a better way to do his thruster flames. I kinda just slapped them on there without giving them much thought.
Ever since I got into the full swing of doing artwork again after launching the Artwork of DeadPhoenX gallery, I knew that eventually this pic’s background would have to be worked on, details and all. I was kinda dreading having to do it after I did the background Chelsí’s Summer Fashion and seeing how long it took. However after doing the Interstellar Striptease and Don’t Shoot Trixie, I had a much better grasp of doing backgrounds again. This would be another tilted angle pic, so I had to put a guideline at first to re-orient the canvas rotation to something I can work with.
But before I talk about the background, let’s talk about Mei. Everyone was getting into the Overwatch fanart craze, especially on the R18 side of things. So of course I wanted in too. At the time, all I saw was Mei getting fanart, followed by D.Va, then Widowmaker, then Tracer. So I picked Mei. However I wanted place her in something warmer this time. At first I thought of a sauna, but thought it better to put her in a bathhouse. Also wanted more practice drawing butts. Thankfully a pose from Super Pose Book saved me and I was able to reference it. Now you might be wondering “why is her hair still tied?” and “why is she still wearing glasses?” Trust me, I thought about this too early on. I decided to leave her hair tied just for the sake of recognition. Not sure how many people have seen her hair down, nor was I sure if people would recognize her immediately from a thumbnail. As for the glasses, it’s there for almost the same reason. I can imagine other people would know what she looks like without her glasses. But in anything involving her, the glasses seem inseparable. So I made a glasses and no-glasses variant over on my personal gallery and Pixiv (when it goes up there next week).
Just before I started the background, I added in Snowball for comic relief and to accompany Mei. I became very good friends with the Add (Glow) filter that Clip Studio had and applied it to Snowball’s thrusters and face.
Moving on to the background. I finally utilized two-point perspective drawing, having it be the blueprint to dictate the perspective of everything. I also had several references of specifically fancy Chinese bathhouses and designed the room accordingly. Basic shapes were laid out, followed by a more detailed design, and finally base color and shading. Objects like the body wash and sandals were added next. But all this stuff would actually be simple. The main event for all this was actually going to be the water. I had several references for water, as well as real life references (aka, going to the bathroom and pouring water in the sink), to see how exactly how water would react to light and shadow while on a surface. I had done water and sweat droplets before (See Wii Fit Trainer pics from 2015), but long streams of water was something different. I wasn’t so sure at first when I put down the base color. The shading gave me some hope, but I wouldn’t feel the magic until the shine layers were added. One Add (Glow) filter later, and that’s when it clicked. Also had to reference the soap suds too. Not as hard to figure that out.
I would’ve added more Overwatch girls to this, but for now I’ll leave it at one. But if there’s enough demand for it, I’ll draw another bath house scene with more girls in Overwatch girls in it.
Done on Clip Studio Paint. Intuos4 Tablet used.
Overwatch and Mei Ling Zhou are © Blizzard Entertainment.
