Thank You Gift for Li-Chan by @smarle (Staci/Nadia)

This is a collaboration gift I made with Red Leader for Li-chan! Yes, I know it was finished two months ago, and that Red already has it up in his gallery, but I'm finally not being lazy and putting it up here so I can put in my comments about the picture... ^^;;;;

Red and I were both thinking of drawing Li a gift for her kindness in offering us a scanner. We both came up with the same idea (the Black Magician Girl from Yu-Gi-Oh!), so we decided to do a collaboration picture! I'd always wanted to do a collaboration with Red... He drew and I colored. He finished the lineart pretty quickly, and actually, my coloring didn't take all that long, either. Red's lineart was pretty and really detailed!

I think the coloring turned out pretty well. The only problem I had was leaving enough white space for highlights, particularly in the thin or small areas... I wish I had one of those white pens/markers that puts white over anything--things would've been so much easier... ^^;;; For the shading, I tried to follow the advice of one of my friends' old marker tutorial and layered different colors on top of each other as opposed to just darkening the base color for some of the colors. I think that gave a good effect, especially in the gold and pink areas. I also lightly ran a black pencil over the darkest shading. I like how that turned out on the skin the most... I did mess up in a few places, like I ignored the space where her hair shows through the hat and made it blue as well. And I think I was rushing a little too much near the end... I don't know how much that shows, though...

Sadly, the picture scanned rather darkly. We hadn't yet figured out how to brighten scanned images... ^^;; A lot of the lineart details were lost in the particularly darkened shadowed areas... ^^; But I still like how it all turned out! I'm glad you liked it as well, Li-chan! ^-^