Commentary
HERE WE ARE. This piece has caused me grief and suffering for exposing how much i am CARRIED by my rendering. Like i said on twitter, i have never drawn a sex scene in my life before this one. While i have drawn pinups before, two characters interacting very intimately with each other and being really touchy-feely was something that i have always had trouble with. But since i can't grow as an artist just drawing portraits and plushies, i have to step out of my comfort zone at some point y'know? (It also adds more to the portfolio) While it would be more appropriate for me, a Mizuki fan, to draw Mizuki getting her hole destroyed by Ena, i still haven't figured out how to draw that (as of writing) and i only want the best for my super cute fufufu blorbo who is just like me fr fr (getting put in her place).
I wanted to add some form of environmental storytelling showing how Emu and Nene got to this point. As you can see on the TV in the background, that is indeed Guilty Gear.
Emu, who is on May, has 3-2'd Nene playing Ram. I also placed down an arcade stick and a leverless controller so you can know who's playing to win and who is just having the time of her life. There's something to be learned from fighting weaker but more random players as an intermediate player. You can't play mind games and neutral with someone who is just doing random bullshit and letting them get away with it. Sadly, Nene didn't apply that lessson and now look what's happening to her. She seems to enjoy her punishment though so idk.
Production
My initial intent was to base this piece around that one EmuNene sketch from the official prsk jp twitter. i found that i fucking SUCK at monochrome coloring and i wasn't gonna learn that with how fucking long this piece took. There was a lot of grief to be had trying to color correct EmuNene with the background, and it took me a whole day doing so much microadjustments because i'm just not used to this workflow at ALL.
I was able to layout the 3D space and add stuff in because of Blender. My 3D modelling is not up to snuff, so i just painted over everything and all the lighting that i did in the beginning was pointless. The background elements were shifted before the paintover, exposing more of the TV screen while not taking away from the main focus. The Xrd screenshot was already filtered in Blender from the start, but i found that it didn't look visually interesting with just that so i did some lil paintovers that sadly got lost from the blur layer i added.
The consoles in the background are meant to be (from right to left) a Dreamcast, an Xbox 360, and a PS4. It's sorta the timeline progression for fighting game console ports and what people preferred back then. Other than that, they're just mere blobs with no lineart or shading painted over there for set dressing.
hmmm what else... AH. This piece fucking broke my Linux install and i couldn't log in to my PC for a whole day!!! What happened was i copy-pasted an image to Krita while i had this art file open. The memory allocation was at around 2.5GB at that point and then Krita crashed on me afterwards. In my panic, i tried to open Krita again but it took so long that i killed its process in task manager and then called it a night. After i woke up the next day booting up my PC and then doing what resembled a morning routine, i returned to a black screen with a blinking underline at the top left corner.
So i figured that it needed some more time so i went back to cook and eat breakfast and IT WAS STILL THERE WHEN I CAME BACK. THE FUCKING UNDERLINE THAT I HATE. at that point i was moping at the tech support channel in one of the discords i'm in, hoping to get some help from someone more knowledgable in Linux than i am. Someone finally comes around and they were so helpful despite my whining and utter cluelessness with Linux. After some diagnosis, they pointed out that my Login Manager of all things was broken and that i needed to get a new one. So i did just that, looking up at some forums and stuff and just arbitrarily decided on GDK3.
It all worked out swimmingly, my laptop booted into the sleeker GNOME login manager and i logged in with no problem except i was now facing an unfamiliar desktop and interface. Turns out that i installed the *entire* GNOME desktop environment and i was contemplating on having to turn a new leaf in my Linux journey unprompted, but the friend who helped me told me i can justt boot back to my old desktop environment by logging out and selecting something there lol. Without them, I wouldn't have finished this piece. Many thanks to you, [REDACTED], wouldn't have been able to do it without you and your help. :))
Wanna see how scuffed my process is?