For this render, I stared out with Victoria 6 and a simple pose. I wanted her holding a skull, so I stared to move her hands inwards.
I then dropped in an
M4 Skeleton.
I hid everything but the skull, and shrunk it down just a bit.
I then moved her hands into position, gave her some hair, and a sinister little smirk.
I then got to work on some skin texturing and lighting.
I then did a render just to see how it was looking. Not bad, but it needs to be “darker”.
To make it kind of eerie, scary, dark (whatever you want to call it), I dropped Jack Tomalin’s
Degeneration into the background.
I added a bunch of lights and played around with the colors until I had something dark and mysterious.
Another test render. That’s starting to look more like it, but the skull needs sorcery action.
I added a green point light to the skull.
I then rendered that out just to see what it looked like. It looked cool, but I felt like I’ve done
green skulls to death already. (No pun intended.)
So I changed the light to red.
Now we’re talking. Bone Enchantress? Skeleton Witch? Not sure what to call it, but she’s into the bones and the black magic.
At this point, the rags that she’s wearing just didn’t seem to match where the render was going. So I swapped them out for the
Vandra outfit and added the
Fatale texture. I then changed the material colors, as well as the diffuse and specular settings.
I changed her eye color to red just to tie it all together. That looks really good. All it needs are some after-effects.
I pulled the image into Pixelmator and added some magic and smoke.
Awesome.
I’d really like to put this one on my desktop, so I’ll need to make a landscape version. I repositioned my camera and rendered one out in 16:9 and 2560x1440.
I then added the smoke and magic. It looks amazing. Unfortunately, there’s a crazy amount of detail that’s lost when you shrink an image down from 2560x1440 to 620x348.
You’ll just have to take my word for it that it looks awesome on my 27” Cinema Display.
