Queen Azalea
The title image of Section 2.1 of Directions of Destiny featuring Azalea Alatus. The original concept was borrowed from a panel in the first version of Directions of Destiny, as seen here.
This was the first time I used a nib pen to do one of my comic-related works; the original drawing on paper has several smudges from when I made mistakes, but needless to say they've since been cleaned up. The background was inspired by art nouveau architecture, and was drawn roughly on the computer before being printed out in blue ink to be "inked" over (in pencil) and scanned back in. Truth be told, I got lazy so some parts of the image I only drew the left side for and then copied and pasted mirrored on the right side after I scanned it back in. Aheheh. :>
Coloring this one was a major pain because, for one, it'd been so long since I'd done this, so most of the time was spent staring at it wondering what I should do next. The rest of the time was just trying to come up with an appropriate palette for not just the background but also Azalea's dress. Particularly difficult towards the end was making the cel-shaded Azalea in the foreground -work- with the fully-rendered background.
I originally started this in Corel Painter X, but after the program crashed five too many times on me for my liking, I switched to Photoshop. It doesn't have the same blending power as Painter, but it's a small price to pay for the added stability and superior processing algorithms. I used to hate Photoshop because it didn't let you dock the little windows to the side as Paint Shop Pro let you, and while it now KIND of has a little method of snapping the windows against the side of the screen, I still wish it were better. Oh well, Paint Shop Pro is on version 12 and it still has yet to do ANYTHING about its horrible memory processing algorithms (I'd been using it since version 4) so I'm abandoning it officially here and now.
Medium: Painter X, Crow Quill Nib Pen, .5mm 2H Mechanical Pencil, Photoshop CS2