The Strongest Monster

Like I promised, this is my second tribute to Teresa. ^_^

The title is a reference to when Teresa’s handler described her during her introduction, and then corrected himself from saying “woman” to “creature/monster”. I love the irony, since she’s such a doll face haha. (As mentioned by the bandit who wanted to rape her!)

Only the lines were vectored in Illustrator, and in one color: black. (I like heavy lineart!) The rest was all painted in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet.

How long did it take? Meh I don’t remember since I took many week-long breaks because I’m lazy. XP However if I were to guesstimate and condense the time it took, I’d say about a week with roughly 6-8 hours of work each day.

Where did I find the stock image? It’s actually from a spread from chapter 79 of the manga, but thanks to Unok on Mangahelpers I was able to use these two images:

[link]
for the lineart, and

[link]
to help with the colors.

As for the background I wasn’t sure what to do at first, but then I looked at some scenes from episode 8 with all the overcast skies, and then I whipped up some clouds, mist, and mountains with no reference. It just happened to have sunset colors since I used the leftover colors from painting her hair. >_>

Now for the process details:
I painted the eyes first (most important part imo), then her face, hair, armor, claymore, and background, in that order. I added her insignia to her claymore because it looked boring without it, and I traced it from the anime’s opening sequence.

Brushes used (all default):
Hard round, soft round, and airbrush soft round.

PS CS2 filters used:
Paint daubs, Gaussian blur, motion blur, smart blur, noise, median, reduce noise, and unsharp mask.

I made the whole thing using my little 1280x800 resolution laptop!

You can easily crop it to make other aspect ratios. I didn’t because there are many ways to do so and still have it look good. (And because I’m too lazy to choose which one. XP)

And also, please do not use for anything other than a personal wallpaper without asking, thanks.

I hope you like it. ^_^ Please tell me what you think because I love to read your comments.

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More resolutions available on Animepaper. [link]

Download here for the full 2560x1600 resolution.