Gally WIP 1 - Digital Imprimatura

This is a painting I was working on today. God, it feels so good to be doing a painting, instead of something cartoony, or pervy. I actually feel like an artist doing stuff like this. I tried to stream it, but Painter is such a CPU hog and I spent the better part of the day trying to fix that. I'm fairly annoyed with Painter. I love all of the stuff that it can do, but at this stage it's more of a resource hog than Photoshop, and that's disgusting.

Anyway, the inspiration for this is the fact that someone gave me a very generous donation to help me out of a financial jam. The only thing they said was that they wanted some commissions out of it, to be done at my leisure. They also gave me a link to a gallery of their favorite characters in anime, comics, movies, and tv.

The first thing that stuck out to me was Gally. Anyone who has read this manga knows how unbelievably amazing it is. Well, I'm not sure how Last Order has faired, I haven't been keeping up with it like I should. Anyway, point is, Gally is awesome.

Now one thing I'm looking for when I do something is whether or not I can draw a... connection... to my life. Many of the pin up girls I've drawn have actually been based on some amazingly gorgeous girls I know. You'll note that my Kim Possible looks nothing like Disney's Kim Possible, there is a reason for that.

One thing that was big in my household was speed skating. My father was actually a competitive speed skater back in the day, and even did it well in to his 70s. He had to quit because he tore his achilles tendon on a start up.

Anyway, there are paintings and photos all around my house, and one thing I always associated motorball with was speed skating. I know it's based on a Roller derby, and that a roller derby is nothing like speed skating, but this is the image that always conjured in my head when thinking about this section of the manga.

I'm having some technical problems in terms of the background, as I can't find my manga or any good refs to draw from. I'm planning to make it look like she just plowed through an enemy and their parts are flying everywhere.

I've also been really inspired by the pallete of Deus Ex. So I'm thinking of lighting this mostly with yellows and light oranges. Go for something monochromatic, but technical looking, similarly to Deus Ex. But that's once I leave the digital imprimatura stage.

The digital imprimatura stage is frustrating because you really have to let go. You have to trust yourself to fix what isn't working as it comes up, and follow your instinct about something look "basically" good. I genuinely do not know where or when I will move on to the next stage. We'll see.

Thanks for reading my babbling, I appreciate it. Take care.