Prestidigitation

For Drake! It’s the charismatic heroine and her bodyguard (whom we’ve met before) — now in 75% less perilous circumstances:

With dragons and other distractions averted, they now have time to become better acquainted. ^^

This was a ton of fun to shade. And once again, in the course of working on it, I discovered a few new coloring tricks and techniques — including the wonders of Gradient Maps! Oh, Gradient Maps, how did I ever paint skin tones without you?

(…By the way, is this suggestive enough to be NSFW? Should I add an “implied nudity” warning? I am never sure about these things!)

…The result of playing around in Photoshop. Since there’s no built-in auto symmetry function (is there??) I recorded a custom Action as the next-best thing. Now I can erase the left half of a layer, duplicate the right half, flip the copy horizontally and merge it back down just by pressing F5. Very handy for character/costume design.

I have no idea who this guy is.

Just a quick mini-project. I found characters who appeared on the same page in both versions of the comic, and pasted them up next to each other.

Why? For science!

Ah, good old you-know-what. I really can’t wait to get back to that part. ♥

I’m also happy to see that my admittedly rushed and flawed comic art of today is still noticeably better than what I was drawing five years ago. XD

Hooray, progress!