The original sketch:


My original characters: Catherine Meyer (the Dominatrix) and Albino Grimby (her friendly rabbit). I've been told that she resembles a very sexy stewardess, who will probably whip you if you ask for too many peanuts. Not sure if that dress actually exists but it's a pretty spicy number. I've drawing Catherine before. Check her out:



For this drawing I wanted to do something a lot more fun. Catherine's not really a dominatrix by trade, but I guess I like a girl in uniform. So instead of whipping we have a bit of jump rope. At heart she's still the girl next door.

For this painting, it's taken me maybe, I would guess, around 10-12 hours to ink and then color her -- that's time spread over a weekend and a few weeknights.

The original drawing was something I did in my sketchbook. I don't know of the bewbies look right, but hopefully they are sufficiently bouncy and right-ish.

For inking in Photoshop, I just used a solid brush and eraser to taper the lines at the ends. I also used the vector tool a bit to get some of the lines to look right -- I generally find that slower than just trying to draw the lines myself.

I laid down base colors, nothing too fancy about that. Since I've drawing Ms. Catherine before as a Dominatrix, I actually have a palette (dating back since 2006 when I originally painted her). It was easy to take color samples and use them and the colors should mimic my previous paintings of her.

For the shade and highlight I used the vector tool on her hair and mostly took a brush and just painted it and used the eraser to help me get tapered ends and nicer curves. Yes folks, mostly done by hand. To decrease the harshness on the lines, I did what's called a "line hold." It was a method I found right here on dA and you can view it right here: Line Hold video tutorial.

Everything is split into layers. So there's a base color layer, then shade, highlight, and gradient layers. The former two layers should make sense by their names. The gradient I used as a light to dark using the highlight and shade colors to give a gradient sweep from where the light fades off into shadow. I think it looks nice. Sparkles for her sweat and the flashes of light on her zipper and hat are done with the star brush.

The background is created with a sky colored gradient and then some custom cloud brushes I created from taking photos of clouds outside with my dSLR and converting them into black and white brushes in Photoshop (I did this ages ago so I still have them hanging around for purposes like this).

As for the U.S. Great Seal (her emblem), I originally did an inked version of the actual seal and I still retain that from 2009. I used some 3D manipulation to put it into an almost correct position and then warped it. Since the insignia was flat when I originally drew it, I had to give it a 3D-ish look. Since it's also quite small, I didn't go into all of the detail. It looks detailed enough as it is.

I've opened this one up to critique using dA's tools. I'm curious to hear some feedback and to test out the critique option. I probably won't make any changes to this image unless I find a little issue here or there then I may fix it, but overall I consider it done. Any lessons learned in the critiques I'll take to the next image.

Please fav and/or comment.

As a final note, I'm still up for art trades. Check out my journal entry for more info.

Update: Changed her eye so they're lined up a bit better. Also recropped the image so it's the full image now.