Ms. Hartley H Scene 01 WIP

Since I promised some WIP posts, I thought I should start sharing some WIP. I'm not going to have any particular structure to these. I'm mainly just going to talk about the process and any difficulties or anything with the specific piece. If you don't care about that, feel free to just look at the sketch and ignore everything else. I'm also not going to do a WIP for every scene or character anything. I'll try to do one each week, but since there's both a character and scene each week, I'll only be doing one of them. Knowing me, I'll also forget to take a WIP a lot of the time. That happens a lot when doing work for my SFW accounts.

Anyway, this is Ms. Hartley's first scene, a blowjob. She's going to be pretty difficult to beat in game, so I wanted a pose that was a little more interesting and dynamic than usual. This is a pretty difficult angle to do, especially in an anime style since it's hard to find a good reference for the angle, but it's turning out pretty good so far. Here's the sketch so far.

Normally I do a base sketch like this, and then refine as needed. Whenever I finish a sketch, I'll usually let it sit for a little bit, then come back to it. It makes it easier to notice if something looks wrong or could be better before starting to render. Since it's a lot harder to adjust things once rendering starts. Not impossible, but definitely much harder and more time consuming. Since I generally work on one layer per thing. Like one for the sketch, one for the skin, one for the shirt, etc. So if something needs to be adjusted, I have to go back, adjust the sketch, then adjust anything it was touching, which may be multiple things. Letting it sit always helps, and is something I definitely recommend any artists do. Both before moving on to the rendering phase, and also before posting if possible. Even if it's just letting it sit for 30 min or an hour. Like, I just noticed that I forgot to add in her glasses. That one isn't a big deal, since it's a separate object that goes on top of the skin anyway, but it's still an important detail that I missed.

If you're wondering about the weird background, the light gradient is meant to show the rough direction of light. Although, sometimes that changes as I render too. I don't always use it either. It kind of depends on how closely I'm able to follow a reference. The main reference for this one is pretty different and has a lot of different light sources, so I can't really use it too much.

Ms. Hartley will end up having this scene, and then two sex scenes in the first version of the game. I'm just planning on doing her BJ scene, and then next up doing the prostitute character. There's going to be 6 scenes for her, far more than anyone else in the game with 0.1, so I want to get started on those fairly soon.

Anyway, that's enough rambling. The final version should be done soon.

EDIT (Sort of):

I had scheduled this post to go out after Ms. Hartley's intro, so there was some time before it went out. I let it sit after posting and then came back to it, and made some adjustments. I thought it would be a good example of why it's important to walk away and let something sit for a while. This is what the sketch looks like now.

Pretty different. I noticed a lot wrong with it. For one, the overall hair shape didn't match Ms. Hartley's, so I changed it up a bit to have that sort of flare out and added a couple of strands to make it look messier. 

Then the penis was also a little too small compared to other scenes, so I made that a little bigger and also adjusted the balls slightly. To be honest, I'm not super worried about it always being the exact same size in every scene though. I'm more worried about how the scene looks overall. It just needs to look "big", without being obtrusive to the scene. Same goes for the hero's body. I want it to be overall average looking, but I'm not worried about making it very specific dimensions. I always view men in porn as more props than anything, and I don't think it's really going to be a big deal if there's some slight inconsistencies. For the most part, I try to frame it so we can't see the face, so it's easier to self insert anyway. So anyway, before the penis was a little too normal looking, so I puffed it up a bit and made it as big as possible without having to make Ms. Hartley's mouth look super weird and stretched out. 

Then I also redid the heel in the back, added the heel in the front since her leg should be about there in this position. I added the glasses, fixed the back shoulder (it was a little too low), and then adjusted the eye position a little bit. i brought it down and back a little. I could keep messing with it forever, but I have to keep time in mind. Otherwise I could end up spending 10-20+ hours on every scene, and that's just not very efficient. It would take years to get even the 0.1 version out. Overall, it looks much better now and the idea is clear. It's ready for rendering. Not sure how I'm going to deal with the glasses yet. They're right over her eye, so it may look a little weird if I completely cover it up, but I want to see what it looks like.

Okay, for real, that's all for today.