Auora's Valentine's day portrait

Not much I can say here. These two portraits took me two days to complete. Which is pretty darn laughable really. But I actually managed to have it finished and uploaded by 11:30pm on Valentine's day, so I just made it!

[All images on this page are released into the public domain. It is not subject to copyright. You may use it as you wish, without crediting me. Enjoy.]

Initially I did some sketches on paper to try to get their heads right, and looked through VCL and google images to try to understand how canine and feline heads looked. I did 17 dog-head sketches before I was happy. For Auora's face, however, she'd explicitly said that it DIDN'T look feline, so I was kindof stuck there. I still did a couple of test sketches to try to get a non-feline looking feline face, then gave up on that.

Then I did some sketches of the pose I wanted: him holding her, drawn from two angles. After two generic sketches, three sketches of her, and five of him, I realised that the image could be symmetrical, which would look kindof arty. So I drew a couple more sketches, slightly modified to be symmetrical, and decided to go with that. Most of day one was used up already.

In Paintshop Pro, I attempted to get my head around bezier curves for the outline. I have PSPv9, but it's a slow, shitty dog, with an interface so utterly impenetrable that nobody could possibly use it: so I gave up and used v7, at which point beziers became totally intuitive. Note well, software makers: a usable interface for the basic functionality is VERY important, far more important than extra bloaty features!

With the border vectored in, I could play with the shape a little until I was happy, then I could start sketching in the characters. I drew the Farrier side first, then flipped it so that their positions would be the same, greyed out that layer, and drew the Auora-side sketch on another layer, with that as a reference. After that, both pictures would be completely separate, apart from Farrier's head, which would be copied from Farrier's image to Auora's at the end.

From then, development went prettymuch as you see it below: each image was prettymuch a separate layer in PSP, with some intermediate layers inbetween.

Apologies for the size of the images: they are 950x950, in order to create the result: two 95x95 images

6,003 result.png: the result of all that hard work.