I was just browsing through some cool new pics when I ran across this one [link] *Ekuneshiel's second entry for the Blade Collector Coloring Contest [link] The McDonald's themed fighter is fantastic and it cracked me up, so I followed it to the contest page. Seeing the variations was most inspiring and the corporate sponsorship angle got me wondering. Being a Coke collector myself I thought that would be a great theme, and since nobody had done it yet I decided it was time to try and really do something nice.

This took a lot longer than I anticipated for several reasons. First and foremost is my OCD like tendencies. The original pencils are good, but there are a lot of places where the lines aren't very smooth are there's a bit of scatter shot when you zoom in. Now honestly, that really didn't matter because it would never be noticed on the final picture. But it was driving me to distraction. I found myself spending a lot of time zooming in and cleaning lines up until I finally decided to start all over and digitally ink it completely. That was not a quick process, either, as you can well imagine looking at the detail on the final product. I'm glad I did it though because it made things so much easier as I went along.

Deciding upon a color scheme was a real time eater, too. I mean, red & white were a given, but how to divvy them up? That dress had so many different areas originally... I took some liberties with redesigning the dress just a bit by leaving a few lines out. It works much better for my scheme and let's me create a simulated white Coke swirl. When I finally came across the idea for bottle green I really got moving.

I got to call up a lot of tricks I had learned and put them into practice. This beast's psd file has 40 layers and is 50+megs. It's also 500 dpi, twice the size of the pic here. I felt I just had to condense at least a little to post in my gallery.

I don't expect to win the contest, but my goal was merely to enter and not look stupid I have to say that I'm pretty happy with the final result. It's given me the confidence to keep working on my technique and look for a few more opportunities to try things out.