Miss Mars - Girl's Night Out

Decided to commemerate Mother's Day with a special Miss Mars piece, as the collaberative project between myself and is about (rather prolific) mothers to be, after all. And by decided, I mean at the last minute got an idea and was foolish enough to decide to try and make a deadline.

I don't normally do group pictures because they still kind of take a lot out of me and even more out of my computer. I do each character seperately, and these days that means each one is around 30-40 layers in photoshop. Then there's the background, which can be even more depending on what I feel like doing. Then I collage them all together and add in the necessary shadows and stuff.

So anyway, a couple hundred layers and three days straight of working on this picture and now it's done. All in all I'm happy with it, but I don't think it was worth the amount of time I put into it all at once. It might not seem like a lot, but this time around I tried new coloring techniques and had to work without a safety net.

And then I screwed up and made a bunch of mistakes like Emi initially being too small in the belly and Elena's necktie not fitting right. So of course, I had to go back and redo parts of those entirely. Eventually though, you just gotta draw a line, cut the umbilical and show the thing off.

I have wanted to do a picture with more than one of the Miss Mars cast in it, though. There's really no other way to illustrate how different each one of them is, in both personality and even more tangible things like height. It's kind of easy to overlook in the story, but Elena is actually like, a foot taller than all the other contestants, whereas Emi barely makes it over 5 feet tall. I also wanted to do a picture of them all in formal wear.

Of course, that means different things to each of them. I mean hell. I talked about it with and , and the three of us came to the conclusion pretty damn quick that Elena wouldn't be caught dead in a skirt if she had any choice about it. And then I had to go back and add more jewelry onto Victoria to make up for the fact that her dress isn't as out of place.

But I digress. Here's the deal. If you're a reader type, check out the story as usual. Darien solo'ed a chapter just for the occasion a well. If you're not a reader, then I should remind you all that reading is fundamental and _can_ be enjoyable.

I cropped quite a bit of this for better viewing on DA, so some of the girls have lost part of the detail on their outfits. As always, a high-res fullsize version of this can be found in the Miss Mars Gallery on Outside Eden.

Feedback on the story, and on the related art, is greatly appreciated, and just about the only motivation we get.