Road to Oskerado

Elderado! Elderado!

Ok, so I adore The Road to Elderado, and these guys were based on that, so I luffs them.

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So two .psd's for these guys (which made my life infinitely easier) but still a very complex pairing.



Soo, they came out rather dramatically different from the parents, I really hope she doesn't hate me for this @.@

The markings on these were a little daunting at first, as mixing them up was going to be a NIGHTMARE. But; I found a very cool solution! I took both parent's markings (merged each parent down to one marking layer each) then put a mask on each. I inverted the mask for one parent, so that it disappeared. Then, I painted out portions on one, then painted in the missing portions with the other! They both ended up with the same toes and tail tips, but other than that, they're fairly well mixed up. (and very nicely if I do say so myself)

Now here's the part that they'll either love or hate... Both parents have fairly light or bright bodies, with white or light gold markings. Both of the babbys are very stark, dark, and saturated. I even overlaid a color grandient on the second. They went from Mayan to more... tribal, in a way.

Electquetzal

May the Thor be with you

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The parent's .psd's name was Thor, so I think of it as a Thor babby, even though I don't think that's what its actual name ended up being xD. No .psd for skyshine.


So there was precious little I could do with the skyshine compared with all the intricacy of the Thor parent. Very soft, blendy layers without much definition or repeat-ability or anything. Even the colors were similar! So, I desaturated the skyshine to emulate the black body of the Thor parent, but masked out the hair, as it is very shiny and pretty on the thor parent. In order to punch it a little more (as leaving the blue lighting and all the blue markings would be the lamest breeding I've ever done) I colored the eye purple (like the shyshine's) and did a purple gradient on the lightning layer. I almost changed the hair to purple too, but coloring a pet around the eye color is always discouraged, and the lightning was pushing it anyway.

Finxelfish

Finx you very much
Ok. Cheesey I know.

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Auuugh, not all that jewelry with no .psd!!! ;_; At least the angelfish has one...



Yep. All of the jewelry had to be cropped out by hand. For the first babby, it was a simple matter of just the bead accents, as I used the angel jewelry. I cut out the bright cyan legs of the bejeweled parent, and based the color scheme around that, picking and choosing angelfish layers and changing them to silver, cyan and blue.

Ok, you know when you give me silver jewelry... I'm gonna make it gold, right? RIGHT? YES! So gold it became, and all the pet with it. I masked out all of the jewelry by hand... and then (you'll be so proud of me) duplicated it, put the duplicate in the clipping mask, then put a very small drop shadow on it, so the shadow would only be within the confines of the body! *bows* I also painted several opaque layers on top of the jewelry to give it a more golden look. The rest was just more angelfish layer and coloring choices.

Tech-Elf Soli

Eldar Solis
(Eldar are the tech-y elves of the future from Warhammer 40k, btw)

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So two very distinctly different sets of linework, and unfortunately, no .psd for the fairy soli. With semi-transparency in the wings... this one's gonna be a B!7@#...



With lots of work, they actually came out as a rather lovely pair, albeit a little more similar than I would've wanted, but very little could be done with the elf parent's body paint being so light, and without the .psd I couldn't increase the contrast without raping your eyes with uber-dark shadows. Without a body paint, we're stuck with only the jewelry and wing edits to use.

Funny enough, the purple babby DOES in fact haev the elfy parent's base body paint. I only pulled the cracks layer and a couple sparkle layers on hard light, but they buried it even at a low opacity. I cropped out the gems and moved them around as jewelry enhancements, and the wings were entirely going through and hue-shifting each layer. I did quite a bit of painting on the jewelry with some blending modes to try to make the jewelry emulate the textured metal look of the wings. I feel I had moderate success with this.

The second babby came very easily, and I think it came out lovely. The wings were a bit tricky, if you look closely, you can see that the fins behind the wings are actually the fairy parents, as I had to crop them directly, but matching the body color hides it well. I cropped out the efly jewelry and lightened and colorized it to give it a nice glowy cyan coloring to emulate the other cyan accents. The wing sparkles and snowflakes from the mech parent lined up quite by accident, and look great where they are.

HOW TO FIND .PSD's

So there are a whole bunch of new breeders around, so this post is going out to the new breeders :)

How to find .psd's:

Obviously, you can just search the artist email for the pet ID#, and many times, that's all you need to do. But; sometimes nothing at all comes up, or that pet showing up in a list, but not their .psd or anything. Now what?

Click on any aywas pet and change the ID # to the pet in question's ID. Seeing the pet itself will give you lots of information:

A.) The owner of the pet.
B.) The generation of the pet.
C.) If the pet has babbys.
D.) If the pet is married (sometimes married pets get missed and you've been assigned fewer babbys than it was supposed to have)


A.- So, if the pet has no other pets mentioned on the profile (no parents or babbys), just pm the owner! They will be more than happy to provide it to you if they have it, as I can't think of many people that WANT a lower-quality breeding. Sometimes you'll learn if the .psd has ceased to exist. (if they say they've submitted it, ask if they sent it to aywas.psds@gmail.com, and included it's ID#)

B.- If the pet is second generation DO NOT pm the owner. They won't have the .psd. In nearly all cases, the .psd IS sitting in the Aywas gmail, BUT, it won't be associated with that ID # because at the time it was sent in (by a breeding artist) it didn't have one! So, copy-paste the parent's ID #'s in there, and you should be able to locate the breeding/predict that babby was created with.

C.- If you STILL haven't found a .psd, but it has babbys, there's the rare chance that at one point there WAS a .psd for it, even if it no longer exists now. Open it's babby's .psd's and see if it has any usable parts from the parent (make sure you don't take anything that doesn't belong to that parent). You could even ask the person who bred it if they keep the .psd's from their breedings (I do) and see if they still have it, though it's a pretty long shot.

D.- Being married doesn't really affect whether or not it has a .psd, but it is handy to know if you need to ask whether you need to make more babbys.

Demon Bunny Melos

So here are all of them I haven't blogged about yet:

Succubunnies

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This pairing turned out some demonic damsels. I had a partial .psd for the deadtail, and no .psd for the bunny.



I actually had a pretty hard time with this pair. I only had the tail part of the .psd, and with none of the blood, as I stole it from a previous breeding that had used the deadtail. (I hadn't gotten ahold of a deadtail .psd in time, and abysmally late as I was with this group, I couldn't wait) On the first bunny, I cut off the tail, and replaced it with the deadtail. I then desaturated the whole thing, and used a mask to color in the spots red. I painted new spots for the tail, and laid over the .png of the deadtail tongue, just masking in the bloody part. The lightning was masked out, but required a glowy bit to make it look better. The hair I took from a previous parent's .png, and masked it out and colored it red. Finally, I cropped out the deadtail eyes, painting over the eyes that were there previously.

The pink one was a bit faster, as I used a white deadtail .png to overlay the blood onto the legs, masking it out and painting over the bit where the tail was. I also cloned some of the blood onto the tail. I took the hair/horns again, but this time I made the horns white in order to give the pet more color balance, matching the white from the belly. I also painted spots onto the ears, since the bunny had had ear spots. I cropped out the bow and did a long series of adjustments to get it dark enough with enough contrast, and still have a solid color. I ended up repainting the edges because they were pixelated after cropping it out. The pool of blood was the white deadtail melo set behind the whole thing, and masked out most of it, painting out where the blood-drool intersected the puddle.

Fairylights

A couple of pretty pretty solis!

Fairy + Princess =?



A pretty pair, for sure. One of the very lovely fairy lantern solis even. The jeweled soli had no .psd :( But fortunately, I'd already used that one in my breeding application! So I already had all the pieces cut out. :D



Mmk. You know you're spoiled when I curl the jewelry into the tail!! Much morphing and tweaking required. On this first one, I focused on translating the pattern onto the extreme body morph, and gave it all of the jewelry. I used the butt portion of the jeweled soli to morph into a tail pattern (no small task, I assure you). I also shifted and overlaid the lantern parent's coloring to give it a nice punch of color.

The second babby looked too similar to lantern mommy with white markings, so I gave her black ones, then altered the jeweled parent's eye to fit inside the pattern. I painted the under-tail marking, and made the jewelry black. In order for the jewelry to read, I had to paint on new highlights so that they wouldn't look like the tattoo sort of markings. The jeweled parent's pattern is a very soft undertone.

Scene it

A couple of scenie melos

Scene it all


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Both parents had .psd's (THANK GOD) I love whoever bred the first one, as all the accessories are in their own folders. I had to chop out many of the parts on the second parent, as they were merged :(




I think they came out rather cute :) Both parents had identical hair bases, but I went ahead and colored them anyway, for variety's sake. I really like that I made the first babby's body color pink. It just makes me really happy xD. The only painting on that one was a bit of striping on the tail. The second babby was a bit harder to keep good variety on, as the green parent's body paint easily gets buried under all that stuff. I cut some stripes in the black markings on the thigh so you could see a bit of her striping.

Class and Sass

This pair is full of class... and sass.

Regal Scenie Pair

So this was an unusual, but obviously gorgeous pairing.

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The first one, even though it's a gen 2, had no .psd :( I'm not really sure why, but it must've been sent some other way than the staff email. I had to use both of her parent's .psds to get all her pieces.



I have to say, I'm immensely pleased with how they came out :) I really adore these two. The hair didn't actually fit in with the peacock tail, so I had to pull it in on the right in order for it to squeeze in horizontally. I flipped all the white detailing to black and blue, but it looked silly on all the tail speckling, so I painted all the sparkles back to white. She has the first parent's cheeky base paint colors, which I shifted the pink paws to blue, and overlaid the peacock tail with a pink-to-blue gradient to really make it shine. I didn't care for the transparency of the hair, so I made it solid for the first one.

For the second I returned the hair transparency, but changed the color to white/blue. I also clipped out the hanging feathers and added the tail ornament to keep some presence for the second babby. I softened the blue saddle marks to give it the blendy look of the peacock parent's base paint, and all in all, I think they both turned out lovely. :)