Full View Please!

Another Gaia commission. I like this one a lot.

I completely redesigned the original avatar outfit. I was given a bunch of avatars to choose from and I saw one that suddenly inspired me. I immediately drew this outfit on a sketch and, with only a couple alterations, I eventually got around to drawing this. XD

I'm so glad I drew the outfit before I started work on the actual picture! This picture took a few days of work, I'm not sure exactly how many hours I put into it. For a long time while working on it I felt that the crappy sketch I had made looked better. XD; I even considered a couple times to just draw over the sketch. I didn't want to put hours of work into something that looked worse than something that took half an hour, maybe. Thankfully, it started looking better, so I didn't have to do that. XD

I drew the paterns on her vest myself, using some other intricate patterned stuff to give me an idea of how to start, then I made it up as I went along.

I wanted this picture to have a lot of details and sort of intricate designs, I didn't want anything to look too plain. So, I came up with a design for the belt buckles, too. I seached on Google for some ideas, but it really wasn't very helpful, none of the belt buckles were what I wanted. They don't look quite as good as I wanted them to, but I like them.

I had a bit of trouble with the hoop skirt. For a while I couldn't get it to be the right shape. Either it was too far out or not far enough. That's one thing the sketch still has over the finished version, the hoop skirt looks better. XD;;

I was worried that, with the hat being black, you wouldn't be able to see the beads on it, but it's not too bad. You can tell they're there, I think. Though they looked a lot better when you could see what they actually looked like. XD But the hat had to be black! FYI, the two charms hanging from the beads on the hat are a fleur de lis and cameo.

My favorite parts of this picture are the cravat and watch. I really like how they came out.

This picture isn't lined. (Kind of obvious, I guess) I drew it in Open Canvas and colored under those lines in photoshop. I had trouble coloring it at first, just like I knew I would. I colored the skin and few different times in photoshop and another in OC. I went back to photoshop and colored out another skin, that looked the best so far. I wasn't too happy with it, until I added a Lighten layer of green over it. Then it looked great! XD That layer made a huge difference and from there I managed to color everything else without much issue.

The skin was very light then and so I made everything else muted to match it. I already had the color scheme from the original avatar, so I didn't have to do much color choosing. The only thing I had trouble with was second, outer skirt. I didn't know what color to make it! Everything I tried didn't look right at all. I had to play around with it a lot before I finally got something I liked. I'm happy with it now. I think it looks good.

So, there. I finally wrote something about a picture. It's probably too TL;DR now, though. XD;

I used screentone brushes from this [link] site to give the clothes some texture.