Whew.

Three days of work. Pencils and inks on Friday, base colors on Val on Saturday. Talked with Bodine (madjester) on Monday- he busted out some padded cell geometry and we nickel and dimed the lighting, did a couple of renders, and passed the environment back to my machine, where I spent another five hours lighting, texturing, writing on the walls, and making this piece the highest quality I'm capable of. The original is 600 dpi, and the full source directory is about a gig and a half. XD

The pose came out of a discussion with xeno about Val and what I was planning for character CG. He found the reference image I used as the basis for the illustration, and Bodine's messing around with the renders on his box gave me what I mentally needed to finalize the lighting.

So. Whew. WHEW I SAY.

< mdxi> you misspelled "dragoon"

There's a larger version of the image (1200x) here:

And, just for the hell of it, here's the background (800x)- the before shot is the base geometry by Bodine (lighting and positioning worked out between the two of us), and the "after" is what happened to it when I cut loose on the render in Photoshop. I'm sure you can get similar results out of 3d software, but it's really just faster for me to do it this way. :)