As promised, here's the step by step creational sequence that, in the end, produced my self-controversed picture, "Wednesday 10AM: How the TV Sees Us" which I actually flamed yesterday before anyone had a chance to see it.

My thoughts on the quality of the picture itself and how it meets or doesn't meet the imperatives I had in mind are already expressed as a comment for the original picture itself. So let's get right down to business here, which is trying to get you a closer idea of how this is made.

Note: framing on that one picture here is a bit different than on the original. I think it's less "zoomed in". As I said, originally the picture's perspective is wider and shows more of the scene/girls. I narrowed it down not to get insta-banned by dA's. The full picture is a bit more saucy but the wider angle makes the scene more "open", as in "breathing space open", while that one has more of a "we're shooting lez porn for this kinky photographer" feel. OH WELL!

1. Any decent picture begins with a decent sketch. So I took the time to sketch my girls out decently here, giving them a close-to-final expression. If they don't have a correct expression from sketch point, it's likely the picture is gonna fail. Also good to lay some minimal shading. As usual, I wanted Roxane's abs to show.

2. Loose airbrushing to get a sense of the shadows, volumes and lighting in the scene. This part here is just as fundamental as the sketch because the way the colour turns out in the end will depend closely on what's happening here.

3 & 4. The bed sheets needed some contrast and fleshing out. On 4, I added some gaussian noise. This comes in handy later. I like gaussian noise because when you play with layer blending/posterize/threshold effects as well as Contrast effects, it gives a lot of nice little results. To put it simply, when you paint skin using airbrushing or even regular brushes, it doesn't really have any sort of texture most of the time. At best, it's kind of plastic and glowy. Adding Noise gives a sense of grain which translates nicely into making the skin less "flat". Anyways, more about that later.

5. Loose colour painting using a regular brush with average opacity (50-70%). The key here is not to make it a work of art, it's just about laying down the proper values in ways that are coherent with the volumes of the bodies. Also works to use the black and white airbrushing layer from step 2 as a reference, which is what I did, to lay down the colours, lighting and shading in a way that corresponds with what I did during step 2.

6. Gaussian Blur on what I just painted. Not really high, though I don't remember exact figures.

7. Blended layer from step 6 with layer from step 2 using the Color blend mode. You get where I was coming from at step 2 when I said it was important to get the shadow/volume painting right? What was meant then was that if you do step 2 right, by the time you get to step 7 and Blend layers, everything else about the picture will only amount to editing and fixing and you won't really have to change directions again or put anything in question. It's the part where the plane begins its descent towards destination airport.

8. First editing touches. First off, duplicated layer produced during step 8 and played with colour/contrast settings and blend mode for a bit. Noise comes in handy here. You can add noise, increase contrast, reveal that grainy texture, blend your layer, fix saturation if the resulting colour is too aggressive, etc. A little bit of paint and grain on nipple and knee doesn't do harm, as well as some smoke around the eyes. Etc. Yeah and some vaguely pink hue applied to the sheets using a regular "new layer, fill with color, blend mode: color, merge layers" setting.

9. The ladies need their hair hued as well as some more touches delivered to their skins and general shading and stuff. In that sense, step 9 is merely step 8b.

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THIS IS WHERE I SHOULD HAVE STOPPED PLAYING WITH THE COLOURING! Yes it's not perfect but it still has a somewhat cartoony/plastic feel that I like, much like what you could find on late Safe Sex. But this is also where I got interrupted by the spouse, went into that deep talk with her whilst absentmindledly working on the picture. Bad mistake. You'll see what I mean at step 11.
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10. Inking time. The notorious Cellfaces inking. I actually like it a lot, and I like doing it, even though it doesn't always give the best results, hence I'd abandoned it altogether for a while on earlier pictures of these girls, in favour of a more ordinary sketching pencil. www.mylife dot com. ANYWAYS. You can see I used a bit of the hair setup from Roxane ID, then expanded on that. This is all done using polygonal lasso tool, drawing very thin lines, etc. Gave Roxane a messy hairdo, because I wanted to make her a bit sweaty at the time. I actually just remembered that. would have been useful to remember that WHILE I was making the picture.

11. Yeah HEY FAB IS THAT FUZZY SKIN HERE?? Aye, well I've warned you. At some point it's either you comfort one doubting woman or you indulge in the semi-lesbian activities of two others, but you can't be two houses's hero (even if one house is virtual). So now what we got is a fuzzy skin, and also the point where I'm past completely losing grasp of the picture, the beginning of an arduous wrestle. The train derails, it's either it crashes, burns and people scream and die, meaning I scrap the picture... Or I steer the wheel through the accident hoping to save what can be saved. I opted for #2, obviously. I don't believe in going back, reverting a picture to an early stage and starting over again. First off because I don't keep backups (heh), and then because as I stated before, I'd just rather look ahead and start something new than turn back and edit old stuff. But that's just me and my inner nature.

12. Wow hey what is that chocolate background with weird glows? It's the blanket and pillows. None of my screenshots show the process of elaboration and realization that part went through. Well it might as well not have appeared at all because it's just about to be scrapped next frame. All that hard work for nothing? Not really but, well, maybe actually. You can notice I've edited the skin in places using some airbrushing, painting, noise-adding, layer blending, whatever I had at hand to try and restore the skin to a state of "less-fuzziness". WHICH MAKES ME THINK! The sketch layer. I typically blur sketch layers to an extent (gaussian blurs) and integrate them into the colour layer using the Overlay layer blend mode. It usually gives a reddisn/brownish shading to the layer it's merged to, which is good to emphasize certain things such as here, Roxane's line between her abs... or some weird shadow spots beneath her breast that look like implant scars. Also fixed Sephanie's skin tone to make it paler and more pinkish. After all, she's the "I'm somewhere between goth emo metal trendy slutty pretend whore or just angsty college girl" type.

13. Some fixing and editing left and right here and that's mostly it. Brightened the area around the eyes, the white of the eyes too, Roxie's nipples were pinkened as they should be, fully rendered her nicely trimmed black bush which didn't really show more than through pixellate leftovers of the long gone sketch layer, etc. And of course deleted the ugly implant scars to restore her breasts to their nice, round, modest natural look. Didn't want to make them stupidly perky as in Masamune Shirow Hentai
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Oh yeah you wanna know what happened to the background? Well, I'll admit it, I snapped. You know, when you feel cornered and powerless and you don't know what to do anymore to save the day, you just try and go out with a bang? I thought of many things. I wanted to dress the girls up at least partially, but I couldn't resolve to do it. I liked Roxane's body too much to cover it. As for Sephanie, her posture is so weird in the first place with the pillows gone that I didn't know what to do with her anymore. Jewelry, clothes? Socks? It all started to spin real hard and fast and I decided to throw it all away, changed the mood completely and decided to stop sweating it, before I'd get a seizure in front of my screen, in the middle of the night, for my trouble. I remembered an old technique I used in an older picture, Comfort, which was basically about adding colour swirls of all sorts to create some eerie lighting. Wanted it bluish to completely cut from the original somber tone, and it was basically the last blow delivered to the original setup as from the middle of the night, the girls would be projected somewhere early morning. That exquisite time of the day where it feels good to be at home because everyone else is at school or at work. You know what I'm talking about. Well the girls sure do.

Thanks for reading! Hope you appreciate the high resolution picture.