Well, lookit that- actually DID manage to finish it before bedtime!

Yep, as I said in my latest Journal entry, what we have here is more of the same, but it's kinda out of necessity- I'm really trying to get back into the whole picture-making thing, and a quickie retread of familiar material can be quite efficacious in that regard. More to the point, though, it was made to scratch three specific subject-matter itches:

1) Super Mario Land bad guys. Oh, sure, every now and then a picture of Tatanga or King Totomesu will show up, but by and large you NEVER see Sarasaland's grunt baddies get drawn. And they're so packed with POTENTIAL! Here we have no fewer than seven bad guys represented. Daisy's choking the hell out of a Pompon Flower with one hand, while administering her patented Royal Headache to a Bunbun with the other. She's stepped on a Nokobon, though she might wanna think about putting some distance between herself and that black shell since those things explode shortly after being stomped. A Nyololin has hold of her left leg, however, and has, without a doubt, the best seat in the house thanks to the clumsy Pionpi that apparently didn't quite stick the landing after grabbin' hold to the front of Daisy's dress . My personal favorite is the Kumo on our girl's back- so big and hairy and altogether nasty-looking! And, finally, we have a crafty Suu, who's inadvertently responsible for Daisy's current predicament since it actually managed to grab hold of her Superball- and since she can't fire another one 'til the first has bounced off the screen, she's been forced to get physical.

2) A full-body design of the Superball Daisy outfit. This came about after a friend sketched her own vision of it, ditching the all-important stockings and adding BOOTS, of all things!

(To the artist in question- I kid, of course .)

Actually, I'd been wanting to take another crack at that Superball outfit for a while, now; I was giving it some thought at work a few months ago, and thought it'd be neat to swap the original design's blue tone for a different color scheme. All the base colors for THIS design came from a screenshot of Super Mario Land running on a good ol' classic black-and-spinach-green Game Boy screen . Gotta say, green looks good on the girl- maybe next time I'll have to keep the outfit in one piece .

3) RAWKIN' B00BZ. ...Well, two outta three ain't bad, I suppose .

Once I had everything sketched out, I decided to take this opportunity to try out a new shading technique. I'd been gettin' kinda bored with my usual one for some time, now, and I'm hoping to experiment a lot more, but the style used for this pic actually turned out to be pretty fun. It came from this tutorial at *Robaato's gallery; essentially, after flat-shading the pic, you shade and highlight with straight black and white, respectively, on an Overlay layer. Tweaked the style just a bit, though- rather than relying strictly on the Overlay layer for my shades, for instance, I added extra tones by shading with the base color on a Multiply layer, and rather than using the lasso-and-flood-fill technique suggested in the tutorial, I went with the trusty Brush tool. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it looks- it's certainly more VIBRANT than the old style, and took me half as long to color as usual since I didn't have to keep hunting down the PERFECT shades for each particular area . Any qualms I have with the results can probably be easily overcome by putting a bit more time into it, but this was always meant to be quick 'n' dirty, so I'm pretty happy with it.