Noir Illustration: Hatta Mari Takes the City

I was glancing back through my blog and realized that I've been a little tease. I've been promising you a glimpse of my sexy supervillain, Hatta Mari, and have yet to follow through. I feel like a mean girl on prom night.

Without further ado, here she is.

Hatta Mari Copyright & TM Mike Mitchell

This image was created by:

• Rendering the figure in Poser 11 using the Live Comic Book Preview mode
• I created three renders, each with slightly different light settings
• I then brought them into Manga Studio 5 and layered them
• There is a base "Black" layer
• A layer on top of that is set to about 20% transparency -- this provides the light gray areas on her body
• This one time, I needed a separate opacity setting for the hair -- I believe that layer (which is layer masked to show only the hair) is set to 50%. I needed this to get the right shading on the hair.
• I then created a tone layer (the thin diagonal lines used for shading) and used a layer mask to show it along her legs, and inside he squares. This was done with hand editing; it wasn't possible to automate this by selecting regions with the magic wand or other tools.
• I then added the background layer (clip art with an MS5 tone filling it) and the text

Next time, I'll do a post that shows each of the layers and how they look during the compositing process.