Blue Fish Archives ~ DeadPhoenX's Old Gallery Site

This match will get red hot. And begin!

Self Critique: I'm wondering if it was even a good idea to completely round out her head. Her head was more pointed before. Not I'm not so sure if that was a good idea. I'll explain my decision below. For the bra variant, I really need to study tight bras pressing on large boobs. No question about the water, I really need to study rushing waves and look up tutorials on how to render them. It was my first time rendering such water, so there's plenty of room to improve.

I finally joined in on the high-seas hijinx and drew Cala Maria. I saw lots of people drawing her and have quite a bit of fun doing it. So I decided to join in on the fun (even if she did take away time from Belinda Cauldron's drawings). Once again, I used my newer Body-chan model for the pose. Thankfully, I didn't have to worry much about the legs of it since it was gonna be a mermaid tail (more on that in a bit). Regarding Cala Maria's body, looking at her in-game design, she looked to be of the thicker type, evidenced by the horizontal line around her belly-button. So I decided on that body type The challenge would be to get it right. Last time I did a chubby girl was with Harriette's first pic back in 2015, which didn't look right in the end and looked rather rushed. This time, I took my time and pulled up my references on thicker women. Quite the opposite from the more toned body of Belinda. So I was somewhat on my own to figure out how exactly to shade it in. I think I could use more practice, but overall I like the result. As for her head, I decided to round out her head since she was chubbier. However I feel like I should've just left it alone.

Moving to her fishtail, this was something that I had to tackle soon. So I dedicated a Sunday to run an experiment on fish tails, particularly scales. I was not about to do what I did with Sailing Through The Seas again and that was very time consuming to do. So I was looking around for material that I could use for the scales, and I was hitting a snag. I realized that I may very well have to draw these scales by hand again. Dreading the thought, I looked on Pixiv for fish scale tutorials to see if I can find an efficient method. I found one, but it involved using material. Then it hit me! I can make the material myself. You can see how that played out over on my Tumblr. TL;DR: I made a few rows, then duplicated it, shrunk the size, and then duplicated some more until it was big enough to apply. What I did this time on Cala Maria that I didn't do on the experiment was that I warped the material to the contours of her body. The end results look great!

For the background, this was going to be something of a challenge as in-game it's all done in Watercolor, which is being transitioned to Oil/Airbrush. The rock formations were nothing, I gotten very used to working on them. The grass I used a grassblade brush on. Though to be honest, I proboably should've a few blades myself and just duplicated it, and probably make them smaller. Now for the tree, this was big change. Before, I used a custom leaf brush for the tree leaves. The end result looked okay, but compared with everythign else when those were completed, it just stood out too much, like soem weird static-y anomaly was occurring. Then Sakimichan to the rescue! I was watching her greyscal tutorial vid last night. While I really didn't have much intention to learn how to oil paint in 100% Color (I was really more interested in the Grayscale portion of the vid), I ended up learning some techniques I could do with the oil brush, and tangentally applying it to the environments, in this case the tree leaves. The process was actually very similar to how I did Princess Peach's wings in Peach Heaven Remastered, albeit with a bit more preparation and control. Now what was tough was the water (which was before I made the fix to the tree leaves). I ran head first into doing rushing waves, which is completely new to me. Before I would do small bodies of water or calmer oceans. But an angry ocean.... hoo boy. I decided to use the watercolor brush to see if that would work. It did for the most part, but it became tougher when I had to crash the water against something, like the rock formations or Cala herself. I probably won't be doign rush waves often in the future, but I can't take my lack of experience with this lying down. So I'll have to study it and maybe run some Art Experiments.

Cuphead and Mugman was added in at the last minute during the one of the sketch phases. An twitter follower reminded me that Mugman's nose is bigger (which I missed the first time, only knowing of the straws being different). I decided to do Filtered Simple Shading on them since, well, they're too tiny to put too much detail on. It was actually my first time doing that shading method fully on a character, taking cuse from the Art Experiemnt I did using Bokuman's Cel-Shading tutorial. Both were done rather quickly, taking only 15 minutes each.

Besides my issues with the water, overall I I'm quite pleased with how this came out.

Done on Clip Studio Paint Pro. Intuos4 Tablet used. Body-chan model traced for schematic skeleton, then drawn on my own the rest of the way.
Cala Maria, Cuphead, and Mugman (c) Studio MDHR.
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Want a hi-res version of this pic? Or maybe a break down on how this was done. Support me on Patreon and you'll gain access to all those, and then some!

Hi-res version available on Patreon!

For this pic, I'm offering the Fish Scales tutorial that I made to Patrons $5 and up. Will be delivered in December.

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