FINISHED LAWL

Time spent, somewhere in ballpark of 12 and a half hours over a period of 3 weeks, a lot of work put into and also lost from a few exits without saves -_-
Finally finished today with the claws, some minor touchups in other areas and a few filters to improve image.

Final results are 190megs PSD, 200dpi, 1700x2338px @ 5.5meg png.
Enjoyed this a lot, hope to do another later.

Tools used, photoshop's soft round brush from 1px-300px in varying opacities; :thumb27376486: for fur and grass; Dodge and burn for everything; smudge and blur for everything; eraser in soft round brush(also varying size and opacity).
The rest is photomanip from photos pulled from google and my own hard drive.

Credits to me for coloring and for lineart.

Current wip, provided lineart [link] and I am coloring this in.
This is a very nice lineart, going to take my time and put as much detail into it as I can, especially those swords

More to come later on, expect 10-12 hours in this before it's finished.

12:00 in, I was right on the money in the time needed, though I wasted about 1-2 hours after not saving the PSD -_-
Cleanup done, touchup done, everything done now but the feet.
Time for claws, these will require a little work ;l

11:00 in, finished hilt guard, just need Hawaiianstile's comment on it before I start calling this 'finished'.
Thing annoyed me for a little while, had to make it flat and messing with warp and perspective to give right angle, meh.

Going to continue cleaning the edges and such to make it look clean, if you look at the full image atm it will have debris all over lol and you will wonder what is going on.

45 active layers! =3

Oh and surprise after he approves the hilt, and it may include claws on the feet ¬_¬

10:00 in, couldn't update earlier cause hurricane caused power outage and neighbor moved his router >_>

Anyway, Cuffs on sleeves are done, sash is done and redid the trim on the ka... thing top feh... ¬_¬
You just couldn't see the material good enough the first time and I redid the layer over and now it's quite visable, think what I did was copied a layer as multiply and pasted and that totally messed it up.

This is with all active layers present, all that is left is the hilt guard which on the left side(right side technically) is a gaping hole. I will be adding this next and then performing some final touch ups.. like finding which infernal layers are causing debris to be showing on other layers....

Also image stats on the right side, image size at close to 200megs and active layers is at 42 exactly after deleting 10 inactive. -_-

8:00 in, started to work on details including the fish design on the scabbards and hilt guard. Scabbards are semi done, gives you a look at what they should be compared to sketch.
Apparently people thought I was going to remove certain details entirely, that is not the case, I am just taking my time adding the details and getting the larger items out of the way.
That hilt guard is next, going to have to make it from scratch, should take a little while to make.
Oh, for Hawaiianstile's friends, I FLIPPED the scabbard around LOL

7:00 in, major update, added background and ground to image, still doing touchups.
Spent or rather wasted an hour on this, thought I had th right window selected to close a stock without saving and closed this psd -_-
That resulted in me starting over from my last save... and then saving everytime I changed something rofl...

I will mention that active layers atm is approaching 30 and is getting rather cumbersome lol...

6:00 in, this is taking longer than I thought with clean up, details are ok, but clean up lol..
So far, fixed holes in clothing that was showing transparency, fixed various rough edges and overlapping layers(ANNOYING). So far Layer Via Cut is the most useful tool atm, having to move pieces around like a puzzle...
Cant really see it well, but the blue trim has a velvet texture and the sleeve cuffs will be the same shortly(these have been annoying me from the start XD).

Another thing annoying me is that hilt on the left of the katana... Not sure what to do with it, I can color and make it look CG but im trying to do this purely photomanip

5:30 in, fur is finished, spend the remaining time touching up and adding details.
A full shot for reference... [link] [link]

4:30 in and FFS, I knew I should have added the scabbards much earlier, now see the gaping hole I have to patch up? Ugh...that just set me back a bit...
5:00 in, fixed the gaping hole, but that just wasted 30 mins, sigh... back to work...

4:00 in, started work on fur and begun clean up in some areas, this is starting to come together. Most of the time left will be touching up, adding small details and cleanup, atm there is a lot to remove that I am ignoring because I keep adding details and layers. Those said details are starting to stack, if youll notice the orange fur is very wiry and looks rough, that needs considerable cleanup.
I added the scabbards, but youll notice the underlying lineart is still showing, and once I remove that the clothing will need to be colored back in to repair it.

On and on...

3:00 in, scabbards added, though the sketch was a little off and having to adjust for it best I can.
If I recall correctly, they are positioned right, every time I have seen double style, they were that position. I will be adding opal fish to it next to mimic the original sketch.
Still quit a bit of work to do to these though, should have added them earlier, now the entire piece is slightly off...meh

2:30 in, top is done, though cleaning this up is a pain in the ass -_-
I gave up on following the 'flow' once I hit that sleeve, ugh, still looks better ;o


At home now and 2:00 into it, can really focus on it since im not at work anymore, done with the Kama....feh cant think of the name, the bottom part of the clothing.
Starting work on top part, dodge and burn tools are your friends.

Working on scabbards atm, this is gonna require some creative photo manip

About 1:30 into it, coming together rather nicely. It's when I get to the details that it's going to get annoying lol
Using this as a reference [link] since the style of clothing and weaponry is similar.