You Are My Fairy Princess

---
Under the blue sky
Next to snow-covered peaks
I have explored this world
Searching valley by valley

Neither in the towns nor in the villages
Can I find anyone
As exquisite as you
It is only
A lovely far-away lady who makes me happy
You are my fairy princess

You are neither slim nor plump
Neither too youthful nor a mature woman
Your eyes are not very black
You are not full of blood
But for sweet looks
I have not seen anyone else
Who carries your attraction
It is only you
Moonlight smiles suit you
For your words are like melodies
---
Adapted excerpt from a Goran poem



It's been a month since I laid the last touches to this... couldn't think of a proper name, nor the good explanation behind this...
I could say how long it took, but that has no meaning so I'm just gonna say why I made this and for who.

For a long time have I wanted to draw a glomping, yet it never came, nor did I have the right characters for it.
Then, at a certain game-forum, I met Tsuki. You can say what you want, but I started liking her because of her behavior, words and actions.
I started to think she liked me back and so, after that time, I had my characters; hers and mine.

I started out with a rough, very rough sketch of the two characters. (scrap to be placed)
After that I started to work things out and get a better view on the situation. I added more detail and changed some proportions. The first version of 'neat' lines was done.
But when I looked at it again the next day, I wanted to change the hands and the angle of the arm a bit. I also redesigned, or added more detail, to Tsuki's clothes and added the wand and the sword. Lastly, I lengthened one of my legs to fit the proportions better.

So now that I had finished the line art, I started coloring.
But before I could do that, I saved the majority of the 'older' lines in a different file, because the in-program document had become over 200MB, and so heavily loaded my computer that Photoshop became slow. So I split it up and kept the latest lines.
First up, and one of the hardest things to do correctly, were the eyes. After a few failed tries on my own, I looked up a bunch of tuts to see how the ' profs' do it. I came upon a very good one, and used it with a twist of my own. It took quite some hours to get the first eye 'as the one in the tut', before I was satisfied with it. The other two eyes took a little less, but it still took a lot of experimenting and trying to get them as they are now.

Next up was my bandana. In reality, I wear one with a tribal style. Because I kinda want to have one with flames on it, I decided to draw flames on this one.
An earlier piece of art, the Flaming Strawberry, showed that I could do flames quite nicely. But still, something gnawed me about the style. I did use the same set-up, with the red, orange and yellow layer flames, but I made the transition better by closing the gaps between the colors. I even added a (tiny) white layer, and used the 'dodge' tool of Photoshop to add a little more light effects, seeing as flames are never the same color everywhere.

At this point, I wanted to color the hair of both of the characters. Mine was done quite fast. Tsuki's hair took a bit longer. I also wanted to add a bit of a shine to it, but not too rough. Fiddling with the various tools, like blurring, erasing at a low opacity, smudging and even motion blurring, it all came down to the eraser and the smudge, 'dodge' and 'burn' tools.
In the process, I removed the internal lines of the hair and added shading for the dimensional look.

After this, I colored the heart =3 and the faces, added the eye white and the slight blushing.
At this point, I found out that a palette is very handy. Not just any palette, but a variable palette.
I'll explain a bit. I took the 'type' of colors from the colors I used to make Tsuki's eye.
Meaning a base color, a highlight, an iris, a pupil, a color in between iris and pupil (middle color), a deep color and as last, a black-ish color.
These 7 colors made my palette. What made my palette different from other ones, is that I added a brightness/contrast filter layer that I had put on 'colorize'.
Next to the layer was a text layer with various names and filter settings.
For the skin and the flames I had a separate set of colors, because the filter layer could not get the right shades in one setting. The colors for the skin I took from the Flaming Strawberry and other, previous drawings.
I had used the palette to colorize my own blue eyes, with one of the settings stored in the text layer.
(scrap to be added)
---

I took a look at Tsuki's character for an overall indication of the major color. It was blue (the eyes were the azure color too) and so I decided to go for a blue scheme for the clothes.
So I experimented with the filter layer and found two settings that I would use for the clothes. A lighter for the 'minor' sections and a deep blue for the 'major' parts.

Slowly but surely, the whole thing came to be. And, at a certain point, both characters were colored and the wand and the sword were too.

I took a bit of time to get to think of a scenery where this could all have occurred, but nothing came to mind.
So, to distract myself from my problem, I thought I should ad the wings Tsuki's character had gotten in the mean time.
Again, I took the same approach for the wings as I did with the whole drawing. I started out with very sketchy lines for the wings and came up with two designs that looked like the ones she had.
I redrew them in better lines and fiddled with the clothing, because it would look weird for wings to sick out just like that. I gave the shirt a split back and 3 sets of buttons wired together to keep it tight.

In the mean time, the file size had grown too large for a few times and I had to 'store' many layers in the storage file and merge the saved layers to keep sizes down a bit.
It's really hard to work with huge sizes and only have 512MB RAM. I was getting used to having a temporary Photoshop 'dumpfile' on my disk that was around 400MB because my comp's memory was running low n.n''
When I was ready to start coloring the wings, I decided to finally enlarge my RAM memory to 1GB.
At that point, I saw the huge dumpfile become very small, but that the memory Photoshop used became, at some points, 500MB.
But anyway...

I had to look for a way to shade the wings so they looked like real wings, rather than plastic thingies. Fiddling with settings of filters, brushes, blurring techniques, all that remained was to manually do the strokes. So I placed a large amount of smaller dots on the wings and began smudging them to strokes. I blurred them, smudged them, burned and dodged them.
It was quite the job to get those done and I'm very proud of them.

But still... what scenery to use?!? >.<

---
Hmm.... can't =/

Hmmmm.... no ._.

HMmmmmmmmmmmmmm......... AH!

The idea came to me when I was randomly searching on deviant art for some Bleach stuff, when I read someone's journal on trying stuff out in his own 'sandbox' as the term was. Being in a 'sandbox' with something, means that you're trying stuff out, testing it to see how it worked out.

I thought, that IF I were to put my characters in the sandbox... how it would be related...
Of course! Sandboxes always have sandcastles! And.. and.. Shikotei (my name on the forum) is a boy and thus builds that kind of stuff. If I were to add a sandcastle, with.. say 3 towers and walls in between, it would look like he's ' protecting ' her against the outside. She's happy about that and glomps him X3

So I started to draw the castle with the 3 towers and the two walls in between. I added the bucket; it's the best way to make sand castles! and of course, the small shovel.
After the castle, the bucket and the shovel, I drew the box itself.
It took a while for all the lines, but then they were there and a way to color them was being thought of.
Because it's sand, wood and grass we're talking here, they're never the same color, so the previous ways to color could not be used here. Else it would look like plastic and that would be a waste of such an artwork!

For the sand of both the castle as the sand in the box, I thought it would be good to use the 'Cloud' filter. Unfortunately, I can't set the size of the 'clouds' and so I had to make a new file, with an even bigger amount of pixels! I think I used 10000*10000 for that.
Anyway, I rendered the clouds in a sandy color. Then transformed them into a smaller size, so they size of the clouds would be smaller and used it for the sand of the box.
The same was done with the castle's sand, but this time I made large patches and 'bent' them into the outside of a cylinder, so the shape was good. The same with the walls, I tilted them into proportion (and angle).

Now the wood, the edge of the box.
Wood usually has a rough surface with curvy things and grooves, so I found it best to use as series of textures to get something that could represent wood. Yet again, I tilted the wood to fit the beams better.

For the last bit to receive its color, was the outside of the sandbox. I was thinking of putting a bit of a pavement at the top, but I never did. Why? Because I didn't have any idea how deep it needed to be and, to be honest, I really wanted to get this done.
So.. I went for grass. And lucky me, there are two grass brushes in Photoshop! I picked two greeny colors and drew grass, layer by layer to give it a 3D-ish look. Still, there was white below it. So a final cloud render with the same green colors, and a short transformation later, the grass looked like grass

Now.. the reason why I submitted this a full month after I completed it... to be honest...
I just didn't know how to bring this.. or how to explain how much effort and love I put in this.

Well.. I'm gonna stop typing now and upload this to show the world