I thought about posting this in one of the creative forums, since it's a creativity problem, but I'm more comfortable here and besides, you all know the difficulty of getting a pet story to work out the way you want!

My main problem is Mylki. In the collective story of my pets, she is supposed to be one of the "rainbow sprites", a group of magical creatures created to basically be servants of other magical creatures, but who have all in one way or another bucked against their instructions and done their own thing. They have a reputation for mischievousness.

Mylki (whose name means "soapy" in Russian and isn't a transposition of "milky") lives in a cove that she was tasked with keeping "clean", and she took that literally. She filled it with soapsuds and basically hangs out there all day with her rubber ducky. I've created an overlay for her that I like but which isn't custom overlay quality yet. This is it:

Do you see the problem? She is most definitely not a rainbow.

And I've tried. I've tried so many different ways to make Mylki a rainbow (even different species!), and somehow she always ends up bluish.

What I need help with is this: how do I justify Mylki's "rainbowness" but also keep her blue?

I've kinda toyed with the idea that maybe she deflects her rainbows into the bubbles, or she can turn it "off" somehow (related to how sea creatures in my world are bioluminescent, but the sentient ones can turn it off at will). But I'm not satisfied with those explanations, so I was hoping maybe someone else can put forth an idea that I can't come up with on my own.

Thanks!

If you wanna see the psychedelic version of her overlay, click here

? The first thing that came to my mind involving rainbows and whales is this image of a whale making a rainbow with its spout.

Or maybe she can choose to trail a rainbow after her when she swims? Kind of like the rainbow trail that spectrum pets have? She could trap that trail in her bubbles too.

Can I just say, that is the cutest and most creative idea! I absolutely love it! And your overlay is so amazing!

My first thought was the rainbow shimmer you see on a bubble, but I have no idea how you would bring that to life in your overlay. Maybe the bubble(s) that she's blowing could be rainbow? Or the light blue patches on her could be/have rainbow shimmer?

here's a couple googled examples of what came to mind for me: 1, 2 :)

I see where you're going with that and I like the concept, but I'm also kind of afraid at this point of messing with Mylki's coloring any more than I already have. The bokeh effect on her flank (do whales have flanks?) was purely accidental, and I'm not sure if I could recreate it, even if GIMP let me go backwards through all the steps and write them all down. Even if I just changed the color of her belly, I'd be afraid of messing that up. (And if I have to start all over again, I'd probably have to change the pet's name to "Baldy" because I'd literally start pulling my hair out. ;) )

I'm kind of thinking about some sort of combination of your two - that she can create rainbows around her like an aura maybe, which are reflected in the bubbles? The problem is that the rainbow sprites are literally created out of rainbows - i.e. the intangible thing that comes from light refracted in water - so I'm not sure how to explain why even though she is a rainbow, she looks blue but things around her look rainbowy. Do either of you (or anyone) know anything about refracted light that would help explain that?

Hmm, without going to deep into the science what I recall is: Objects absorb colors, and whatever color isn't absorbed is the color that bounces back to our eyes and thus is the color the object appears. Blue is the frequency that penetrates the deepest (why the ocean appears blue). And a prism is what takes the light and separates it out into the visible color spectrum. Is there anything in there that could help?

Perhaps the sprites are more like prisms? They're magical beings that split the light into the color spectrum - since technically the colors are just the light being separated into its frequencies by -science here-. So, maybe since she lives below the surface of the water she naturally absorbs (keeps inside) all the other colors and reflects/appears blue - but that's why she can still create her aura/bubbles with the other colors? Or, if she's just made of the colors, can she choose to appear blue to blend in with her habitat, but still expresses all her colors through her aura/bubbles?

Don't know how much help that is or isn't.

i dunno if this helps you or not but here's a lil experiment I did to see what it'd look like if I added color with masks & layer styles! I also hope you din't mind me playing around with your image ;u;

img

but whatever you decide to do, I hope it turns out well!! :)

Your example made me feel brave, so I tried something myself:

I think I like it! A bit Lisa Frank but not too much. Although after beefing up the white outline of her belly and eye thing, her black outline looks even more terrible now. XD

I like both of those ideas but I'm not sure how to convey it properly. Maybe I need to do some science research?

OTOH, it wouldn't make sense to make her a prism, because that would negate the the rainbow sprite lore that they are the literal rainbows. Her compatriots do a better job of appearing as rainbows:

SPOILER (click to toggle)

But OTOH, it's already canon that the ladies who made the rainbow sprites messed up quite a lot (the first rainbow was cleft in twain into two entities) so it's possible that they made Mylki the thing that creates rainbows rather than a rainbow itself.

But maybe with this updated overlay I can just go with the idea that under the water, she looks mostly blue, and in direct sunlight she looks more iridescent.

I do like the white line a lot! :) I think with some cleaned up lineart it's gonna look great <3

Thanks! This may seem like a dumb question, but...how would you recommend doing that? Just tracing it over some more? It's really hard to make smooth lines in GIMP (because it's not a vector program, it's something else that I don't remember the name of), but I do my best. However, if you have a different way to clean up the lineart, I'm definitely open to suggestions. :)

raster :p but it's still possible to make smooth lines with raster formats, you just gotta use the right tools! Do you use a drawing tablet? I haven't used GIMP in a long time, but I believe it has both a brush tool and a pen tool. If you have a drawing tablet, the brush tool will be quicker and possibly easier since you can just get a smooth round brush and draw over the lines you need to.

If you don't have a drawing tablet, though, I'd give the pen tool a shot. It basically lets you put down some basic lines and move/bend 'em around. This video here does a pretty good job of explaining how to go about using it for lineart :)

I tried out the path tool as per your video, but it didn't really work for me - I think it would be better if I was completely replacing the outline, but I just wanted to do touch ups here and there.

I do have a stylus for my touch screen, but I'm actually pretty steady with the mouse if I blow it up to 1000% and turn on Smooth stroke.

Anyway, I think I'm finished! Gonna sit on it for a little bit in case anything else pops out at me as needing a touch-up though. She came out more jewel-toned, which is just fine with me. Very sleek and shiny looking. Also, she looks more blue on one of my monitors, and more purple on the other one, which I think is just fitting for a rainbow pet. ^_^

What do you think?

it's better!! but still has quite a few jaggedy areas (plus I would outline the bubbles on the head/tail so they don't look "pasted on" as the custom overlay rules mention!) I tried my hand at it a few days ago to see if it would help me make suggestions...it didn't really, but now I have this, haha:

img

I didn't post it before because I don't wanna come off as rude or anything before even giving you a chance ;A; I do enjoy helping people out though so hopefully this helps you understand the changes I made....I saved the lineart separately so you can use it however you like, but you may need to do a bit of erasing/coloring over some areas that I altered if you do use it! I hope you don't take any offense, of course....it's a cute character and I wanna see it be the best it can be!!! (I'm by no means an overlay expert so I'm not saying this is the best possible solution/outcome!!! just my thoughts ;u; )

Actually I do appreciate it! There were some lines that I couldn't get to not look pixely no matter how hard I tried, even when I was using the path. I'm not sure about outlining the bubbles because they weren't outlined in the first place, and some of them were already a part of the pet. But I'll try out your layer when I get back to a computer. Thank you. :)

Edit: The outline doesn't look as blatant around the bubbles as I thought it would once I applied it to the image. I also really like how the eye is...more now.

Before: :After