AAAAAAAAAAAAAA IT'S FINALLY FINISHED

So. Yes. Last month/year/decade I posted this sketch: (link)
I lamented that since I had RSI in my wrists and hands, I wouldn't be able to finish it before the new year. Well, about that...

This ended up being SO HUGE that I couldn't have finished it then even if I'd worked around the clock, lol. As you can probably tell! This one has a long history:
- I started the sketch in Krita on my laptop, on the 23rd of November.
- With a rough, I brought it over to Photoshop and refined it.
- Then I took it back to Krita and did the lineart.
- Then I brought it back to Photoshop again and did colouring for like, a month. It took me... probably about 3 days just to get the shirt to look right!!!

So yeah, this is almost positively the longest I've taken on a pic without significant downtime (e.g. Yira with Socks 2: Yira without Socks taking around 5 months, but that was because I left it for long periods at a time). Is it the new magnum opus? Given the sheer amount of effort I poured into the textures and lighting (and unlike Big Wing Goth GF, an actual background this time), I feel it's appropriate.

So what's with this pic? Well, I've drawn this Charmeleon gal a couple of times before:
Charming Charmeleon / One in Char-million
(Oh look, you can see what her shirt says now. But just because she's still wearing it doesn't mean she likes it... b-baka!) I've decided to name her Paprika since I seem to want to keep drawing her (and why wouldn't I, hohoho). The original idea for this pic was to have her with Amante as a Charmeleon, but I liked her by herself. I just kind of rolled with it after that; the background idea came very late in the game, like... yesterday. Then I wanted to do a drawing of her with clothes, and a followup... uh, without. That's still in the cards, but I don't think I'll start on it right away. I need a rest after this. I mean... scaly textures? Shaded clothing creases, including shiny leather? A realistic concrete texture THAT I MADE MYSELF, FROM SCRATCH?? Yeah, I'm pretty buzzed about finishing this, in case you couldn't tell. I'm proud of it, but I still see room for improvement.

Oh, and about the scaly texture: I made a pattern to use for super-detailed scalie pics like this in future, so it's saved separately and I can bring it out again if I need to. I may like to tweak it so there's less vertical space between them. Small flaws aside, I think this was worth the wait.

My first big drawing of 2020, whoopeeeeeee~