Touhou - Inubashiri Momiji - Semi-Nude

Saw this image on the IMT thread on /w/.  The person wanted the ear completed, so someone completed the ear, but then left the tail incomplete which bothered me.  So I decided to just do the extra work of vectoring the entire image, and completing the ear and tail from the original.  I also decided to create three different versions: Nude, Semi-Nude (one posted here), and SFW as well as a black and colored line version for each.  Those will be included in the Dropbox link.

In terms of difficulty, this image had its ups and downs.  The lineart was not too difficult, and since the hair was short and not ridiculously long, I didn't have much of an issue there.  The breasts were of course the most difficult, because there has to be a balance of a perfect circular shape, while at the same time, some form of a curve with a sense of being "pushed" against the skin.  Annoying, but I think it turned out okay.  The frills were also annoying, but there was thankfully not too much of it.  Coloring is where this gets fun though.  Everything is a mix of gradient meshes and  solid colors, with no blurs whatsoever.  The face, hair, hat/extensions, and tail were not difficult and were fairly easy to do.  The skin chest/stomach area required more work, as I had to fill in the spaces that were covered by the clothes (for the nude version) and I also had to merge about 3 separate gradient mesh blocks together and get them to "mesh" together.  The nipples were also difficult, as I never had worked on them before.  I normally don't gradient mesh with a circle, since it  makes it difficult, but I had to do it in this case as I refused to use blurs, and the radial gradients weren't cutting it.  I got it to work though, and then added in the white highlights with radial and linear gradients.  The total gradient mesh count was 35 gradient mesh objects, and 804 nodes, so I didn't overkill it this time around.

Now the most annoying part; the transparency filters.  I have used transparency filters in the past and they have been helpful at times, especially when I am having a hard time picking out the right color, or if I have a shape going across two colors.  However, this was a massacre, because this required the use of transparency filters, opacity shenanigans, and layer management to the max.  For the dress that covered the breasts and the stomach, I had to fiddle with finding the right colors for a while, deciding on using a mix of the  Darken and Multiply transparencies, and then choosing the right opacity for each.  For the frills, I had to make it so the coloring was over the lines, so I couldn't use Darken or Multiply, as it put them below the lines.  Instead, I had to use a Hard Light transparency on the white part, then Multiply on the shadows, and then mess with the opacity levels.  This was annoying however, as there were points where the shadows went over the lines and were conflicting with the transparency that required some tweaking.  There were many other issues that I could highlight, but this is already too long, and no ones going to read this, or anything else I write anyway.

Original by Asn-s: danbooru.donmai.us/posts/16416…

Dropbox: www.dropbox.com/s/46nwm5b3qdnt…

Edit: Apparently there was a nude version.  Edited the nude version to be closer to the original.  Also added some highlights I missed.
Edit2: Fixed a shadow in the hair.