NGE: Hikari's Dilemma - Shot 9a - Condoms!

Riding high on finishing the animation for the intro for Hikari's Dilemma (Newgrounds / Vimeo / Youtube), I, uh, neglected to do the next scene of Voyage for Poon (Soon, I promise!) and instead dove head first into the next bit of NGE.

So, after the title screen, we cut back to a closeup of Asuka rolling on a condom. I actually started this shot way back, before I'd started on most of the intro shots, so it's nearly finished. Just a bit of tweaking. However, as I was working on it, something was feeling a little off. The transition to it felt just a bit too abrupt, especially when I viewed it in context with the completed intro. It worked, but it wasn't perfect.

So, well, you know....

I had in my head this image of a closeup of packaged condoms, with one open, laying on the bed and establishing the context for the next shot. Maybe it was a bit of hubris, but I felt like maybe I could draw something simple... and if it ended in tears, as me trying to draw usually does, I'd beg Cyberunique to help me out.

All of the other shots (with the exception of the Title Card and the Ending Animation), were converted from art that already existed in the original comic in one form or another. This would be something entirely new...

First step, I popped open Blender and whipped up some simple condom geometry so I could figure out the shot composition. After a bit of fiddling, I wound up with this:

But that was the easy part. I grabbed a screenshot, a bunch of references images, and then hopped over into Krita. To my EXTREME surprise, it immediately started looking amazing.

Having somehow produced some line art that I not only didn't hate, but was actually a bit proud of, it was time to add some color. In my first attempt, I went for a more painterly style... because in my head, this was a still, and background and stills in anime are generally painted, right? 

I'm actually not too upset with how this came, out, but the problem now was that it just looked wrong. The style wasn't right, and the people I had critiqued it said I should've gone with a more cel-shaded look. When I explained my reasoning, they asked if I had gone and looked up any reference from the show, which, uh... 

No, I hadn't. Upon doing so, I find that yes, a good portion of the backgrounds, especially with stuff like this, are still cel-shaded. Oops. So time to try some cel-shading.

This actually wasn't as hard as I'd feared. I'd done a good portion of the work figuring where the highlights on the wrinkles and such would be in the painted version, but it required some tweak, especially for the condoms that were a bit more front facing (and thus exposed to more light). Ironically the hardest part was doing the much more simple bed-sheet background. That took a while. 

And then I was done! Except... well, at some point in the far past, I saw either some fanart or a doujin (I can't remember which) that featured some NERV branded condoms... and that thought has stuck in my head. 

So I changed up the colors a bit and through on some NERV logos.

While I like it, I honestly felt it wasn't reading as well as the pink condoms. So I played around with the colors some more.

I wound up with this while doing some of the changes, and I really liked the look of the dual colors. Buuuuut... when I showed it to a few people, the first think they asked me was if that was blood.

So those colors were out, plus I still didn't think it read as well as the original pink shading. But I still wanted the logo, and so wound up with this. 

I liked it, but it still wasn't quite what I wanted. And then! While I was pulling this shot together in After Effects, I accidentally put in the wrong value for a few settings. I also wanted to try the dual color thing still, and wound up with this!

I'm super happy with how it' all come out, especially since I drew it! How did this endeavor not ending with me sobbing in a corner? I don't know, but this shot is just what the animation needed.