Guardians

(Am I the master of lame titles, or what?)

Characters from Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon.
My colored version of 's lineart, which you can see [here].



I cannot count how many times I nearly had to start over on this. I am SUPER PICKY when it comes to how my stuff comes out, so I've been known to get over halfway done and start over because of a little mistake. I kind of slogged my way through the frustration on this one though, and I'm glad. I really do hate having to start over.
I was reading some fanfiction stuff while coloring this between chapters/pages. When I got to Venus, I kept thinking "Her hair bow is orange" over and over, and somehow that got shortened to "The bows are orange" You can see how this is a problem. So after I realized I'd just colored all three bows orange, I hastily colored over the two on her uniform with the turquoise pencil, and damn if I didn't color one of the bows wrong AGAIN. (The one on her back is supposed to be yellow. I like it better turquoise, personally, and probably would have done the one in her hair that color too had I thought about it. Venus & Jupiter are the only ones whose bows aren't the same color. Why? I dunno.)
I colored Jupiter's face PINK instead of fleshtone. And no, I don't know how Venus' skin came out orange-ish. I used the same shading style on all of them. >_<
I couldn't decide whether Mamoru/Tuxedo Mask/Endymion's (Who is he supposed to be here?) suit was supposed to be black, blue, bluish-purple?! So I compromised: The jacket & pants are heavy black shaded, with blue filler, and the little folded-over part next to his shirt is the reverse. But with that, the bowtie HAD to be red. Not enough color for me. lol
I did Usagi/Serenity's bow yellow, because I thought it would be pretty. And it is. But her hair is yellow too, so I had to soft-shade some orange over the bow to at least make the colors a LITTLE different.
And because after all of this I was creatively numb, I opted for the simple (boring) silver background shading for the lot of them.

On the other hand, I LOVE Usagi/Serenity's and Chibi-Usa/Small Lady's (isn't that just a nickname? jeez I feel braindead right now) dresses. They were the highlight of this.

And yay, I'm learning how to do "lighting" on the hair. I'm going to wear out my chunky pink erasers, but it's hard to decide where I want the effect to be until I'm done shading an area, and then it's too late to do it with the pencils alone. Oh well, the erasers are way cheap anyway.

First one with my little "Colors by RJ" logo there. Made that on FlamingText.com because I didn't feel like doing it pixel-by-pixel in paint.

Thank you, thank you, to [reirei18] for letting me color this! I really enjoyed it, even if I tortured myself with it lol!


Lineart belongs to [reirei18]

Colors by [RJ]

Sailor Moon belongs to Takeuchi.