Palm can be a difficult course sometimes.

Self Critique: Where the skirt flips makes it seem as though her butt is flatter than it actually is. The hand on the putter could grip the top a little more. Her right foot… I wish I could’ve caught much early on to turn it more inward. The hand holding the ball needs work.

So sometime back I started playing Mario Golf GBC on the 3DS Virtual Console and played quite a bit as Grace. At the time I was still brainstorming who to draw next, and then it hit me, “I should draw Grace next. Not many people do fanart of her, or at least r34 fanart.” I thought of several poses, and settled on the one you see now. Had to depend big time on the rotation tool as it looked like she was still standing upright after the preliminary sketch. Was was conflicted about her legs being too long or not. The still looked a bit long, but as long as other things fell in place, it could blend in. One thing I want to make sure of was to improve on shading in the back of the knee. I remember 80s Wii Fit Trainer’s having a goofy looking one and wanting to improve on it the next time I did it (which also explains why I chose this pose). I looked up several of the references I had, and the end result was much better than before.

As for the background, I was gonna place Grace in the Palm Club course, the one she hails from (and this is why I didn’t do a real background for Grandia’s Lily). The references I had for it were a doozy, as all of them were screenshots from the GBC, and you already know how limited the color palette of the GBC is. The N64 version, which I have on the Wii Virtual Console, had no such equivalent (or at least something close to it). So certain features were left up to interpretation, namely the palm trees. With the grass, since they were trimmed low, I tried out something knew with it. This involved duplicating the grass’s base layer and applying an HSV white noise filter, then de-saturating it to gray, then filtering that though. Then it was a matter of smudging from side to side and lowering the opacity. The end result looked really good. I also did the same to the rough in the background, though this time I whipped the edges upwards at a higher rate and making that layer more opaque than the green and fairway. So now I know what to do next time I encounter short grass.

Done on GIMP 2.8. Intuos 4 tablet used.
Grace, Palm Club, and Mario Golf are © Nintendo/Camelot Software.