Heartache 101 ~Sour into Sweet~

Obviously this takes the whole Star Fleet thing a bit too far, using the exact same logo and all that, but this would just be a sample. The hair for the other girl wouldn't be too hard, but the robes would take some work. So I'm just showing you this for now, as she is certainly the easier of the two to create.

Okay, I have Photoshop, which makes some of this easier, but I think the techniques can probably be transferred over to Gimp pretty easily. If this isn't the case, I apologize, as I don't have much experience using Gimp.

I started by finding one of the layers that had the base of the shirt (the chest portion with the tie, sans the sleeves and the the collar.) You can pick whichever *ahem* chest variety you wish. I've used this technique with the smallest one for Aoi and the medium one, for Junko. I've never used it on the largest chest size because I think it looks a bit silly, but it could easily be used with it. Then I duplicated the layer that it was on, as I'd be doing some editing and didn't want to ruin the layer for further use later. I then used the brush tool on this new layer to cover up the tie, using the eyedropper to try my best to match the colors as they appear elsewhere. You can either choose to lock the transparent pixels, so you don't "color outside the lines", which is what I did with Aoi, or you can just wing it, which is what I did with Junko's track uniform shirt. As you can see, it looks pretty messy so far. Don't worry too much about that. It will look better pretty soon.

The next step is to blur the colors together, so that the shirt looks a little more natural and less patchy. There are several ways to do this. I'm not sure that Gimp has the same tools that Photoshop has, so I'll try and cover a couple of methods. You could, of course, use the blur tool. This works well enough, though there are several drawbacks to it. One is that as you blur along the edges, it actually makes the edges less precise and you loose pixels. Therefore, you can't do it with the transparent pixels locked, or the places where you loose pixels will turn black and rather ugly. In any case, I would recommend duplicating the layer again before trying to blur it, as if you loose pixels, having the other layer visible underneath the one with lost pixels will give the impression that the shirt has retained it's shape. Plus, it allows for any little hiccups that might come up.

I will now bring up my second and preferred method of blurring the colors together. This technique works much better, but I wasn't sure Gimp had it, whereas I would be very surprised if it didn't have a blur tool. I'm pretty sure that Gimp at least has filters, I'm just not sure if it has my favorite blur filter, so this method can still probably be of some help. You start by finding the filters, which in Photoshop have their own menu, and finding the different options to blur. Some of these options are better than others, but they should all work, given enough fiddling. My favorite is called surface blur and only blurs the surface of the object, so that the layer keeps it's shape. It also allows you to mess with the settings before you blur them, so you can get them looking the way you want them to. I know menus like those can be a little confusing at first, so just mess with them a little until you think it looks good. Just be sure not to blur it either too little or too much. You want it to look similar to shading on the rest of the tachie.

You can see below how it looks after I used the surface blur. Looks a lot better, doesn't it? However, I still wasn't satisfied with it, so I undid the blur and messed around with the colors a bit more, to see if I couldn't get it to look better. I was much happier with this result. Now it was time to change the color of the shirt. I did this by going to Image -> Image Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation (or Ctrl + U). I'm sure Gimp has a similar tool, but I'm not sure where it can be found, so I'm just telling you where to find it in Photoshop. In any case, the menu for this tool has three different settings, hue, saturation, and lightness, which can be adjusted via a slider or by entering values. I just fiddle with the sliders until I come up with something I like, and then I make sure to write down the values I used, so I can replicate the same color later, should I decide I want to add sleeves or something. If you can't get the color you want, there is a box you can click that says colorize, which allows you to get any color you want, but it colors everything the same shades, so that if you have more than one color there (say you still had the yellow tie in some capacity) and you wanted to color it pink, it would all become pink, whereas if you don't use the colorize option, the different color would change colors, but still wouldn't be the same color as the shirt itself. In any case, I chose a nice red for the shirt.

Now, I'm sure you can see that the outline of the shirt is still quite messy. Using the polygonal lasso to select parts of the shirt and then delete them, I created a nicer looking neck line. Then I use the same tool to select a neckline with a turtleneck and use the eyedropper and the brush tool to color it in. It's starting to look very nice, isn't it?

I now add a layer style called a stroke, which creates a border around the shirt. I choose a color I like and set the thickness of the stroke to 1. Unfortunately, this makes things look a little messy again, so I use the eraser and polygonal lasso tool to clean up the edges a little more so the border will look better. Then I'm done with the shirt, except for the badge, which I add by creating a shape with the polygonal lasso, which I fill with a gray color and then adding layer styles to put a 1 pixel gray stroke around the border and add a bevel to give it a 3D look.

I create the pants by duplicating the layer that makes up the tachie's skin and then changing the color using the Hue/Saturation image adjustment that I used earlier. This makes all of her skin look black, so I use the lasso tool again to delete the layer above her waist, so that only her legs look black. Then I find the layer the has the outline of the body and repeat the same process.

As for the hair, I merely changed the color of the braid using the same methods as above and moved the layer so that it was behind the layer with the skin, so the braid would appear behind her body. I used similar methods with the bangs, eyes, and eyebrows.