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Cat-girl-aholic — Well, I caught the fish
Published: 2006-03-14 02:39:51 +0000 UTC; Views: 2170; Favourites: 34; Downloads: 38
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Description
Another lovely lady from Dead or Alive enters my gallery - this time it's the Chinese beauty Lei Fang.This picture is a bit of an exception to most of my work. I usually use a pencil sketch as a template - even if it's real rough one - for my digital art (in fact I've gotten in the habit of doing at least a couple of sketches to get things looking decent before scanning). I've never felt that confident working from scratch in Photoshop, even with a tablet - it's hard to match the comfortable feel of pencil against paper. In this case, though, I opted to skip the pencil sketch(es) and try creating this 100% in digital art. I don't do this very often and is more challenging for me, but I had a lot of fun working on it.
I tried my best to make this look like Lei Fang - her character design is not that close, but close enough I think. If she doesn't look too much like Lei Fang, well then just enjoy her as a cute anime-asian girl. It took me a bit of time to actually do a rough sketch of her in Photoshop before I could start coloring her. During the coloring process, I encountered a number of glitches and mistakes that I needed to fix - she underwent a lot of corrective surgery, especially to keep her more or less symmetric and keep all the parts of her centered along the correct axis. I'll admit that a lot the structural problems would have been easier fixed had I used a pencil sketch, but I accepted my fate and just kept working on it.
The coloring was not too difficult (once I got her figure worked out). I must say I'm most pleased with her face - I'm finally getting comfortable with noses, especially the area around the nostrils. About half way through, I thought she looked a bit too bland, but just a slight tilt of her head added a lot of playfulness to her pose, which definitely helps fit with the character. I initially wanted to do a picture of her in a leopard-print bikini (I didn't quite match the image in my head), then got some ideas of what more I could do with that. It took me a few tries to make her bikini look decent - still not the best looking leopard-print, but good enough. She hasn't just been sitting out in the sun though...after a bit of spear fishing, she's managed to catch dinner (hence the title of this piece).
I wasn't too troubled painting the fish - I intended it to be a pompano (or some similar species), and with a quick web search for a reference, it was pretty easy. I took a few liberties with the coloring, adding stripes to it, so I call this a tiger pompano. Must be good char-grilled. Mmm....I modified my coloring protocols a bit and tried to enrich her skin tones a bit more than usual. I think the results are a bit mixed but I'll have to work on standardizing my techniques to get a more consistent color scheme. I tried not to skimp on the detail in this and a few things that I added when it was almost finished improve this picture a lot. Most notably, I like the shadows from her bikini bottom strings and her snorkel. I also added water droplets to give her a "just out of the water" look, as well as the slightly untamed look to her hair.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with this, though it was at least a fair amount of work. Hopefully this is just a taste of future works. Thanks for reading all this. Now...where's the tartar sauce!
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Comments: 15
A beautiful and evocative picture! The streak of blood on the fish contrasts with the overall calmness of the scene, and adds a lot to the effectiveness of the image. It's interesting that we're not shown what sort of spear she caught it with. I'm reminded of the way cats keep their claws out of sight, except when actually using them. Or perhaps this Chinese girl has been influenced by Laozi's saying, in the Tao Te Ching, that weapons should not be displayed...
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Thanks very much for the comment! I must admit that the fish is the only part that really holds up well...but fish are not quite as fun to paint as girls in bikinis. 
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Whatever the reason her spear gun isn't shown, I think this picture tells its story very well without one.
At first glance we see a girl in a swimsuit holding a fish, then her mask and snorkel, which tell us that she caught it underwater, then we see the wound in the fish, which tells us how.
If you do revisit this idea, with or without visible underwater weaponry, I look forward to seeing what surfaces.
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Oh, your Leifang looks so yummy(the fish too)! Her innocent expression is truly appealing and her tanned, atheletic body is definite head turner. Her leopard print bikini is so hot that I would burn my fingers if I try to remove them...although, it is definitely worth the try. And the way you did the hair is superb I can almost see every strand. Finally, your CGing skills are impressive as heck! ^^
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Thanks much! This pic is starting to get a bit old but it was a lot of fun to create. I was just starting to figure out my techniques for hair so there was a bit of trial and error, but I was eager to perfect my methods.
I love how you describe her bikini - I hope we get to see something like that in DOAX2 (and maybe with matching cat ears too!).
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Whooooaaa man your descs are soooo long ;____; Ok uhm...
Her big eyes are so pretty and cute :3 I really like the soft texture to her hair, again :3 The shadow from her hair and the snorkle are very nice and add depth to the image. The leapard print is a really cute touch and I think it came out very nicely (and soft looking, too!) The background may be a bit flat (as been mentioned) but I really like it. It seems the atmosphere and mood for the piece :3 The shiny texture of the fish is really cute!
My crit is on her hips, though :0 Firstly, I feel her torso is a bit short (but I have a superlong torso so I alway exaggerate that anyway) and her hips aren't quite long enough. Its kind of difficult for me to explain so I drew on your pic (sorry for not asking but its just to prove what I mean better...) [link] I hope its clear :3
Once again its really crit heavy ;3 But I think you did a great overall job-especially with her bright and warm skin colour :3
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Yeah...sometimes I can drone on in my descs...thanks for reading though. LOL
I definitely agree with you on your critique...I don't mind your example pic - quite helpful. I know I've had problems with hips being too small in the past...my natural tendency is probably still to draw them too narrow, so got to try to overcome that. Her torso really isn't as long as it should be...I was studying some screen shots of the character while working on this and realized I really didn't match the same form (my cat-girl in Enchantment is also a bit compressed too! LOL).
Glad you like this Kat...it was a challenge to do something like this completely from scratch, which made somethings more difficult than they should be, but it was a lot of fun to do. Thanks much for your kind words and thoughtful critique. I've been pushing myself to improve and fix as many screw ups as I can, but as I'm sure you know, it's very easy to overlook even obvious flaws. That's where feedback like yours and the other comments above really help!
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Good work! I like it. First of all, well done on the nose. I agree that you're improving there, and I also agree with your thoughts on the head tilt. It's surprising how effective that can be at changing the girls expression, and it seems to be quite a common pose for Lei, come to think of it. I can see you've tried to get her face looking right by how you've done her eyebrows, and fringe. I try to achieve similar effects in my own work, and Lei's face is one of the hardest to get perfect. She has a certain mischievous look about her. While I admit you haven't quite captured it completely, it's still a good attempt. For the future, try and make the eyes a bit smaller and the lips a bit bigger, and you'll be on the right track I think.
The thing that doesn't quite look right for me is the way _her_ right leg connects with the body. The line comes up a little too high, and curved at the wrong angle, I think. I realise you might be trying to give the impression she's stepping forward a little bit, but I think it'd be more effective if the line was lower and a bit straighter, and less defined. So that her abdomen and the leg are meeting each other on equal terms, if you get my meaning. Otherwise, good work on the fish and her hair is nice too. The water droplets on her body are a nice touch, and necessary I think, for a water-based pic.
I'd agree with Rita about the background. They can be tough alright, and I always tend to rush them because I leave them 'til last, after I've pretty much finished with the girl and just wanna get her out there. A good BG can make a difference though. It looks as though you've drawn it yourself using brushes. Instead, I'd strongly recommend finding yourself some quick little tutorials for elements of the background and any other interesting materials you ever have to make use of, using sites like [link] and [link] The ocean is usually achieved by creating clouds from the filters menu, then adding a motion (I think?) blur for a long thin wave effect. Gaussian blur is also useful for bringing the character into focus, out of the background, and where the ocean meets the sky there, I'd recommend blending them together more, perhaps by softly erasing the edge of the one on the overlapping layer. If you look at real landscapes, you'll see that happens, the further away the horizon is.
If you don't understand some of that, I'll be happy to elaborate. Or you can just ignore me completely of course. Overall though, this is good progress. Some people don't like using fancy Photoshop effects and prefer to stick to their own raw skill with brushes, which is fine too. Both methods take alot of practise though.
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Thanks much (again!) for your detailed and helpful feedback! I've looked over the background in this picture quite a bit and I'll admit I've got to be just as critical about it myself. Thanks for the links (did a quick search for "ocean" and found one right away that looks very good!) - it'll take some time to digest but now that I've become more demanding of my artwork any resources out there will definitely come in handy. I'll also say that I need to stop treating backgrounds as an after thought - I've been slowly changing in this regard, but I definitely didn't give the background here as much effort as I did the figure. After thinking about it, that's what's been bugging me about it...but I also figure that once I get used to putting more effort into backgrounds, it will get easier to create them.
As for her leg...yeah, I think I see what you mean. That was one part that I actually did the shading twice as I found I had to rearrange some bits of her mid stream. For future works, I'm going to have to try to restrain from doing any shading until I'm sure all the anatomy is in the proper place...though once I start coloring one part it's hard to hold back. I actually did want to reduce her eye size and enlarge her mouth...but somehow that slipped from my mind. I need to also start getting in the habit of typing out lists of edits/changes needed once I get a picture to a certain stage of completion - I did that for "Elegant Beauty" and was quite helpful.
This was a fun pic to work on...and in retrospect I think Lei Fang is the best character to use in this type of picture...except for maybe Hitomi - those two seem to have a more playful persona than the rest of the cast. Thanks again for your feedback - it's very helpful, especially since I'm in a phase where I want to make some significant improvements.
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Very nice Jeff, I love how you painted the fish as well.
If you want advice on how to give more depth to the sea, I'll help just ask
Steph
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Thanks Steph! The fish turned out better than I expected...I'm very tempted to do some more work on that theme. Absolutely, if you can give me advice on improving my maritime backgrounds I'll welcome it. With my fondness for bright, blue skies and *ahem* girls (feline or otherwise) in bikinis, you can bet it'll be put to good use.
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Awww poor fish X_X i guress Lei just caught her dinner! anyway great picture! I love her swimming suit 
Rita
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Thanks for the comment! Yup, she's ready for a nice seafood dinner. I understand your comments about the water...I did spend some time coloring it and yeah, it probably is a bit too flat. I had a thought of adding a sandbar as part of the background but decided it was okay as is. I just wanted enough of a setting to know where she is. Oh well...I know I can't get everything correct, but now I know what to work on the next time I create a sexy girl in a bikini at the beach.
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Hmm... I think Tomonobu Itagaki should lower Lei Fang's hair in the next DOA game. Anyway, great job on this one.
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Yeah, I love Lei Fang with her long hair free and flowing - that's one nice thing I liked about DOAX was it let you alter their hairstyles (though there's lots of ugly clipping in certain poses). Thanks for the comment!
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