Live Brief - WeLoveFine - Design 1

For my first design, I decided to start off with something simple, and so I chose to do a pin up of the series' titular characters, and based the look mainly on those dreamy pin-ups that are normally done as promotional works for most magical girl animes and mangas (Particularly Sailor Moon, because Naoko Takeuchi absolutely loved drawing dreamy illustrations of her Sailor girls, and we of course loved seeing them).

I always have trouble figuring out where to position
the character's hands as seen in this sketch.

While this is pretty much a slight alteration of Bee's dream dress, I was also
considering whether I should also stick to the colour scheme used in the
dream sequences, or instead stick to her normal colour scheme.
In the end, I decided that the unique dreamy colours remained the more appealing
choice, seeing that there was also a unique treatment of the
line art itself instead of just plain old black.

For her redesign, I was really aiming to give her a more princess-y feel (A side of
her that is still not often as shown as I had hoped on the show), and so this redesign
was inspired by various renaissance dresses. As you can see here,
I was looking up various references of slashed sleeves.

Almost considered adding in an extra colour her dress, but removed it later on
and simply stuck to the colours that were already available in the reference.

I decided to use my painting style for this particular design (I suppose
you could say that I was inspired by some of the winning designs
that used a similar art style for their works), as the dress would
look a little too plain if I were to flatly colour it.

I did have a bit of trouble figuring out the lighting and so experimented with
several brushes for quite awhile.

Yup, still trying to figure out what looks decent...

Added a little lace to the bottom 

Though then again it's going to get hidden away by all the bubbles...
I do however love how the bubbles magnify parts of the dresses, one of
them even vaguely shows the lace detail.

No, I didn't forget about Puppycat (I feel bad for leaving him last all the time though).

Added in a few extra little colourless bubbles around them.

I actually considered making her hand sweep through a stream of bubbles, but
thought it looked too busy (Looking at it now though, it actually doesn't look too
bad... doh).

The submission process thankfully wasn't too troublesome (Though I was
a little lost at first since the site was recently redesigned), fabulous thing is that
there is an incredibly low character limit for the description section, so I didn't
need to spend too much time filling that section out (I even went past the limit the
first time).

While it has been submitted in, I won't know whether my design will get accepted,
it would seem that I would have to constantly check the page as I won't even
get notified about it (This turned out surprisingly scary, especially after seeing
their rather harsh rating system).

And this was the mock up image I submitted in, it is sad to say that their submission
kit isn't as impressive as Qwertee's...