Who thought this get ever get fanart!

Self Critique: I should probably stay quiet, but her eye to our right is actually a little bit higher than the one to our left. The way the shading of her nose just… ends, is rather jarring.

Self Note: I only need one color for water streaks, much like a I did with A Warm Bath with Mei. Next time, don’t use two colors.

So then, I went ahead and did fanart of Bubble Bath Babes. This was very much a “what if” scenario as I asked myself “what if I drew fanart of this?” To get into the groove, I played a bit of the game through a rom. It was suprisingly addictive and rather challenging. The pictures that would be put up after every few rounds were what you’d expect for the NES, which weren’t too great. The artstyle also didn’t mesh well with the 8-bit style, and probably would’ve benefited more from a more simpler anime style. Either way, I was going to draw the girl that was always at the bottom of the playing field.

I used the very handy Mikoto 3DCG program to get the pose I needed. Obviously having just the original image from the NES game was simply not going to work. The face was very much up to interpretation, so I drew it how I usually do faces. I did take a couple of liberties with the bodyshape compared to the original since, I mean c’mon what kind of detail can you get from a sprite that small!

The background was something of a challenge on a conceptual standpoint. I wanted her to be the focal point and not zoomed way out if I was going to recreat the entire playscreen. So I had to make due with just showing the bottom of the field. I recreated the border, improvised the bottom of it, and used a rubble brush for the texture since it was hard to tell what kind of pattern the original game was using. I remember back on A Warm Bath With Mei how I did the bubbles and tried it again here. At first I had no clue what I was doing for the bottom bubbles. That’s when I switched to the hard Airbrish with Continuous Spray on and drew random circles. For the ones further away from the pack, I erased away at their centers. Water streaks were applied as well on the body, though as previously stated, I used two colors when I should’ve used just one over several layers and filter them. As for the background behind the Babe herself, I opted for just the rest of the blue wall to be visible with a transparent effect. Most NES games used a static color background (like blue or black) to save on memory or to make it easier to see puzzle pieces. When the 16-bit era started, most games used a transparency effect, making the outside wall visible behind the playing field. So I went with that aesthetic.

Done on Clip Studio Paint. Intuos4 Tablet used.
Bubble Bath Babes is the (c) of Panesian/Hacker International