The Crystal of Nysul

I guess The Taming was a valuable lesson for me in developing a story out of a photo series, a lesson that I took to heart when I started The Crystal of Nysul.

Having done a few Hive and Technology manips, I really wanted to try my hands on something of magical nature. I started browsing my stash for inspiration, before extending my search online.

BareMaidens came onto my radar quickly. Even though I wanted to stick to modern day settings to push me in the right direction for SymCity, I remembered Callidus' advise in his interview:

My personal maxim is "good manips start with good source material." Find images that speak to you, that inspire a story in your imagination, and then work on bringing that to life for your audience.

The first image set that inspired me was actually of the beautiful Gadriella, I had some vague ideas of what I could do with the set, a simple short series maybe. But when I stumbled upon the Evilyn sets with Crystal balls, all bets were off.

I really wanted to wait till I finish before uploading the entire chapter, but after some major re-writing of the first few pages, I knew Pages 1-6 were ready so I uploaded them to the collective out of sheer excitement. Luckily the last few pages didn't take too long to complete.. I toyed with the idea of messaging a few of my collective idols for feedback first, but gave up the idea in the end. Part of me was fearful of rejection, part of me felt the need to "make a name" for myself first before approaching the veterans....

If The Taming was a lesson in layout, then The Crystal of Nysul was a lesson in work-flow. Since this series is more effect heavy (a lot more), I decided to develop the effects in the source photos before putting them into the final template. It created a much cleaner layers pane, and gave me much greater focus on the individual elements of the images. It doesn't come without disadvantages.. it took a lot longer, and every change (a lot of change happened) involve returning to the source picture and reinserting it into the layout template. I had less overview of how the image fits with the others....

During my major re-write, I inserted two entire pages to the story as well as the dialogues. This forced me to reshuffle the order of the images to better fit the dialogues. It added an extra evening into development (wasted another with the original script), but I was much happier with the result, so I guess it's worth it in the end.

The Set

Effects breakdown:

The main effect of the series was on the Crystal ball. I started with 0% fill shape layer with outer and inner glow to create the red glow. Then using cloud render + differentiate clouds, I created the yellow swirls / lighting effect inside the crystal. Add a bit of masking, and another couple layers to put the glows onto Eve and it's mostly done.

As the set had no close ups of the Crystal Ball in hand (my templates are 2400px by 3456px), I had to create my own Crystal ball for the cover, and page 5. I got away with the lack of reflections for the cover (I think) as the Crystal is implied to be superimposed, and I think I got away with it on page 5 since the Crystal is emitting images. The effect was a simple case of taking Page 1 Panel 1's source image and doing a Spherized filter to it before applying the other effects.

Of course, to add challenge to myself I decided I needed the Crystal in three panels that didn't come with one (Page 6 Panel 2; Page 9 Panel 1; Page 10 Panel 1) for improved continuity. To maintain the consistent appearance of the Crystal ball, I decided to grab the best source image I had (that is not around her genitalia), masked the ball out and duplicated it. Then by rotating the duplicated layer and some more masking, I had a fairly realistic looking Crystal ball for me to play with.

The real test is on Page 10 Panel 1 when I decided that the Crystal ball should return to its Crystal state, and placing it by Eve's body. I painted in (with a white and black brush) the refractions with an Overlay layer, which hopefully makes it look like it belong in the scene. Did you notice it was a prop?

Another effect I applied was on the pendant, when Nysul transfers her power from Crystal to Pendant before entering Eve's body.. I guess the effect isn't as prominent in the resized versions, but I basically used a couple of Screen Layers with a round red brush and vein yellow brush to paint on the effects. A bit of radient gradient masking and it was job done.

Finally, I wanted to give the impression on Page 7 that Nysul's rewriting Eve's thoughts gradually. I experimented with several effects around the spreading of black veins into her thought boxes, but it just did not work in the end especially from a readability prospective. So I ended up just duplicating the text layer, deleted the unwanted text before applying various layer effects to finish. Unlike most collective manipulations where text manipulation is concern where the subject's text is gradually transformed into something else; I actually wanted to make Nysul's influence become part of Eve. I'm not sure if it works for you guys, but it does mean I don't have to keep messing with text effects later on in the series :-P

Anywoo, I hope you guys enjoyed the series. If you want tutorials on effects, just ask. Meanwhile, here's a teaser for the next set: