I'm finally finished!

Whether or not I actually spent a lot of time on this, it feels like I worked the longest on this piece out of all of my
submissions!

Why Samus?

Like I said in my terribly long journal entry recently, I was going through my gallery to look for older submissions I
could retouch as practice for drawing humans and I found some Metroid fan art
hat caught my eye!

After a few rounds of messing around, I tossed the idea of remaking the older piece in favor of creating a new one! I'm
not sure what the red creature is supposed to be and I'm not sure what planet Samus is on, but I never know these
things beforehand - lol.

The only Metroid games I've played are two from the Prime series, but I'm interested in playing the side-scrolling
iterations someday.

Playing Smash Bros. got me curious about the silent woman in the robot suit. Knowing how acrobatic and slender she is
under that clunky armor makes her seem more intimidating and appealing.
_{Also, it doesn't hurt that she wears a form-fitting jumpsuit...}

Why a tropical island?

Knowing I wanted to do some Zero Suit Samus fan art and not having played any of the games recently, I Googled
around for some images that could have helped me in deciding the environment and an image of the Tallon Overworld from
Metroid Prime stood out to me.

I took the image into Photoshop and traced a few shapes from the background. but due to my terrible sense of
matching colors, I decided it looked most like a tropical island - lol. The tree trunk and waterfalls are the most
obvious things that were kept, I think.

While working on the mountains in the background, I thought about adding some constructs. I created them, but
eventually scraped them because I couldn't figure out where to place them. Maybe I could make some ruins or something
as a background for another Metroid piece?

Is that all?

During the course of the project, I thought about animating the whole scene like I did with an old Flash project, but
I wanted to stick with presenting a hi-def image first.
Perhaps I'll go back and animate everything when my animation skills get better; it was a lot of fun the last time.

I'm glad with how the reflections ended up! It's not at all realistic, but I've never been a huge fan of realism (which
might just be an excuse).

I wish I understood waterfalls more while I worked on this! I couldn't get the mist to look right and tried to avoid
showing the impact they had against the other body of water. Maybe I should just focus on drawing waterfalls for a
while - lol.

While doing extensive research on Zero Suit Samus through Google images, I realized that she had a gun! I'm
not sure why I didn't try to recreate the gun she uses in canon, but she also usually wears her hair in a ponytail
while she's in Zero Suit, so there's that - lol.

What's next?

My plans have not changed and I should be working on ~Hakuyako's characters next! After that, I'm not sure,
but I'll try to remember to let you guys know ahead of time this time!

Again, if you've read all of this, you really deserve omething.

Until next time!