Yes, it is true! My “fan” painting is done, and yes, it’s Mass Effect’s Tali’Zorah. Now, since this is my personal blog, and I love the look of my own letters, I will be expounding on the epic (for me) 23 hour journey. Three things to point out that you really need to pay attention to:
- I don’t do this detailed paintings usually because I love being vague, and I just want to get it done.
- I don’t usually spend more than 6 hours per painting, double that if there’s background. I spent on this painting about four times as much as I usually do. It kinda shows.
- I don’t usually do fan-art. The few times I’ve done it I’ve stuck to the original material as well as I can. No difference here. But never expect me to “disrespect” a franchise by doing an “interpretation” of someone. Fuck that. I want to just capture the “true vision” and make it better. I’m not interested in taking liberties. I can do that in my own paintings. What’s the point of doing fan-art if you’re not faithful to the original material?
Now having said all that, I did take some liberties. Mostly because I thought the way I did worked better, or I just suck too much and didn’t know how to make it work the right way. These are all very minor things, though.
Remember to check the bigger picture for details
So, now that you’ve seen it, I’ll talk a little about the process a little. One mention, though, yes – I did the “boots” a little different. Deal with it.
First of all, I collected about 100+ reference images. None of them were my own screenshots because I’m lazy fuck and did it the hard way. I collected all concept art I could find, and all the screenshots. Second thing I did, two months after I collected the references, I went through them and tried to think a pose. I kind of wanted to do Tali/Shepard, but that’s too sappy for me. Plus, it’s been done. The frontal view is also everywhere, especially either with omni-tool or gun. So, something else. So I figured I’ll do a painting from behind.
Promptly, I was overcome with the sad realization that there’s preciously little images of Tali from behind. Oops. Well, I’ll make do with these five images.
I did rather like the white/black/gold look on Tali as I saw it on one screenshot (below). As her standard look was a little monochrome, and I wanted some contrast. I do dark paintings (yes, in subject usually, but now I am talking about the general level of brightness) and I thought that I can’t really show any kind of contrast between different sections of the suit unless I have a little stronger color contrasts.
Main Reference
The black/white is pretty obvious contrast.
This is why I named her in the picture as “Tali’Zorah Vas Normandy”, since that’s her “loyalty” suit. At least, as far as I remember. I haven’t played the game since it came out, and I’m relying on some screenshots. For all I know I could have had three screenshots of a mod.
The picture on the left is the main reference image I used. I stole the pattern on the hood. Well, actually just that one part most visible to the viewer. Why? Because when I started first drawing those swirls, I took my wacom pencil and shoved it through my ear. Alas, my girlfriend stopped me at the last moment, and I figured I should probably try to find an easier way to get those patterns.
Second reference, full sized.
So I took the hood, scaled it up, fiddled with it to black and white, screen blending, added some other pieces of screenshots. Transform, warp, scale, skew, etc.
All scaled up to the wazoo, as well.
I mean, these screenshots have Tali about the size of 500×500 and of that I am taking of that some 50×50 area, and I am painting in the resolution of about 2900×3500 (A4 in 350dpi). So they’re pixelated to hell and back, nevermind the JPEG artifacts.
But, at least I have a fucking pattern to paint on top of, so I don’t have to go do some radical perforations.
Ecstacy.
So, anyway, painting her back and whatnot was eeeesy peesy, since the main reference had her in basically the exact position I wanted her to be in. So I just stared at it and drew along. That was the easiest part of the whole thing. Then after I got her drawn, I had to fill it up with details. Wot? More swirls?
Before I went kaboom, I figured that “suggesting” patterns is as good – or even better! – than drawing the patterns. Right, honey? Right. Cool. So that’s why whenever you see her swirls anywhere but on her hood, they’re not really a patterns, they just “suggest” that those parts continue the pattern established on the hood. Now, I couldn’t get around the fact that I needed a diamond pattern on her pert backside, though.
So, I wondered about that for a moment. One idea I had was to make a stamp of the pattern, then spread it around that area on its own layer, then erase what goes over the black edges, then use transform tool, wrap, tweak, bulge, etc until it looks good. Then what? Go fix it by hand.
Okay, at that point I figured I’m being dumb. So I just went ahead and painted it, and made a new custom spray brush to get the highlight texture and so forth. That brush got used all over the painting, since I had started to render the painting, btw. Shit, the diamond pattern took me probably about 30 minutes to do it by hand, when I was sure it would take about two lifetimes. So I consider that a clear victory.
I ended up doing a little “bulged” diamond instead of the one you see in pictures, which is flat.
Detail of the pattern, full size. Not from final version of the painting, but close.
Now, the most epic issue I had all along was the legs. Which I still don’t like. Fuck ‘em. When I first drew her, I ended up making her stubby legged. Fuck. Not by much, but enough. I hadn’t somehow accounted for the fact that she was standing on tip-toes, even though it was what I chose to make her legs look a little longer. Well, har har, very funny. Stop laughing.
So, I made her legs longer, and painted along. Then later on a funny thing! Not. I had to shorten her thighs a teensy bit, because they weren’t really matching her anatomy.
This would have been a lot easier if I had been smart enough to have an reference for proportions from the start (you can see it up top there), but no. Of course I’ll start using it only halfway through the painting. Who’s dumb enough to use it from the start and not having to fix things when they’re really annoying to fix?
Yeah…
Speaking of that, I painted the boots out of my head, but didn’t really look at them until at the end, and lo and behold! They have one teensy structural mistake. But fuck me, I like this better anyway, so it’ll stay.
So, I could shave off about four hours of the painting process by not doing stupid mistakes. But I still think it’s a really cool painting.
I might do an wallpaper out of it if enough people beg for it.
