Mai Fin (ish)

  Welp, it took little more than a week off and on, serious and semi-serious (in terms of time investment) sessions and a whole lotta of testing and other shit, but she is done, at last.  Here may I present the finished Mai Shiranui picture...

 "Sure to give Chun-Li some food for thought x3"
(Ed. Note:  Please visit my deviantArt page here for the full version.  I'll post it there tomorrow)

   I said it before and I'll say it again:  she was a fun one to paint.  It's technically marred in more than a few spots for sure--and there's nothing saying what was done here will stick in the future--but it felt like an overall step forward to do.  Now that I've learned how to use mediums for dilution of the paint, I hardly think I'll ever be stepping back to the dark ages of using water alone, or perhaps water period outside of the thin initial underpaintings.  There, it seems like it can be very useful, but for final work I doubt it will make a comeback.  But hey, u never quite know.

   I also picked up some interesting use of mediums in ways I'm not sure they were intended for..on THAT front, there's much more testing to be done, but I do feel confident in that w/ them, I can get a greater range out of the limited set of tubes I got.  Even w/ that said tho there's no time to rest on laurels:  there's another picture I'm doing for a friend that I have to start from scratch again tomorrow (well, not really scratch, but I'm not using the line drawing sheet I had before, even if the pose will remain about the same), and in between working on that (and posting some bits of it here), I'll try experimenting some more w/ creating color swatches and getting a better handle of the mediums.

   Reminds me, too, that a new brush or two is in order.  These brushes are wearing down, and new ones are always more than welcome...

   That'll do it for this time; I hope u all dig my Mai piece.  Maybe sometime in the future I can go over the process, but as this process is ever-changing, all the future seems like an immature moment to pick for that topic.  Tomorrow I'll prop back up w/ some pictures and underpaintings for the new picture.  Hint:  we're taking it back to olden Norse times for this one ;).  Catch 'ya l8r...