~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~UPDATE~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If anyone has read the recent IFX magazine (turn to page 27) you may have spotted my name in it. No, you weren't hallucinating, I was one of the 1 runners up in the Naruto unleashed manga competition (which means I get the episodes 1-13 boxset) because they obviously liked this picture, which was the one which I submitted, so yeah, I'M A PUBLISHED ARTIST BABY! *cough* ahem. No, but it was cool, only 5 of the people who won prizes were from the UK, and it was apparently a really popular competition, so I'm pretty proud of that. (Although I have to admit I don't actually like the naruto anime series... manga's great, but anime... not so great.)

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Once upon a time, there was a little deviant called claudi89. in August 2005, she drew a picture of fairies with her new french curves and inked it with her new pens. She then scanned it in and promised to colour it in by November.

Well here it is, 10 months late, finally coloured! yay!
I spent so long deciiding how to clour this one (I originally divided it all up into tiny sections - like each individual thorn - and painted bits which didn't touch on the same layer. After aobut 2 months of doing that I gave up since it was taking so damn long! Then I came accross a little colouring tutorial by *shirotsuki which really inspired me, so I decided to do it that way instead. I must say I prefer this to the old dodge and burn shading idea a whole lot more.

Whoever said fairies are alwys good obviously didn't do their homework. I thin this was subconsciously inspired by Kaori Yuki's fairy cube. Very subconsciously as I hadn't actually read it when I drew the picture, but the usual kaori yuki elements are there, blood, gore, things not as they seem, a slightly controversial concept (I haven't seen evil fairies done before) gothic clothing and some pretty characters

I was originally going to put freckles on the main fairy but my sister looked at me like I was a complete psychopath and informed me that evil people do not have freckles, period. Besides, my freckles looked more like smallpox.

This was the first picture I used Photoshop for anything other than cleaning the lineart in. It does blend colours a lot nicer than OpenCanvas, but boy does it slow the old laptop down! Little extra details were added in OC, and yes, those are more of the butterfly brush from Photoshop in the right hand corners. I'M SORRY! I just have a bit of an addiction to that brush and the right hand side was looking so... empty

The small size doesn't really emphasize the eyes as much as it should, I put aqua highlights on the lashes too whoch doesn't really help. I should probably put the trails coming from the petals into perspective, since the petals are mightly close to the screen (DON'T LET THEM CATCH YOU!) and if anyone else can give me critique and things I need to look into (besides the pose of the main evil fairy, which I know looks a little awkward) I'd be more than happy

I'm not really sure if this should be filed under manga/anime or macabre/horror, I'm not really that clued up with the new sorting system

anyway, approx 30 hours OC/PS (well over 100 if you're counting the numerous changes in methods of painting)