ADDING TESSAIGA'S BLADE

I used the color manga shot of the crystal Tessaiga from Tankoubon vol. 33 as a reference for color and general appearance.

When I drew this image (April 2004), neither the Kongousouha, nor the Diamond Tessaiga had appeared in the anime, so basically I was making up the effects as I went along, based on manga.

Tessaiga's blade begins very simple. Using the pen tool, I drew in the basic shape and used the "make selection from path" to make a shape. Then I filled it in with a light grey (almost white) color. Using the same path, I feathered the selection about 30 pixels and filled it in with a slightly darker blue-grey color. The end result looks a bit like a regular "metal" blade.

OOOO... SHINEY!!

And now to make the blade of Tessaiga look as if it has a crystaline pattern on its blade. Realistically, a cut and polished diamond will act like a prism, and you'll get any color of the spectrum reflected. But given that Tessaiga isn't a perfectly cut diamond, and also that it would just look goofy to be rainbow-colored, I scrapped that idea.

First I used the selection tool to draw in my crystalline pattern. It doesn't all have to be in one shape, as I've done here. In fact, you could draw in every facet manually, but either way, it'll turn out looking the same.

After stroking the selection area with a 4-point dark blue line, leave the selection tool ON, and use the gaussian blur tool to blur the line about 3 to 5 pixels. The end result is the selection only being blurred INSIDE of the selection area.

INU HAS STRIPES... SO DOES HIS SWORD!

It'll still look a little weird at this point, but now you've got the basic face of the Tessaiga planned out. After drawing in the facets on both edges of the blade, I then erased the extra lines and got this end result.

The thing about crystals is that they're very irregular. Tessaiga, as said before, isn't a perfectly cut crystal. It looks very rugged and unplanned.

Do don't go overboard on this part, and also dont' worry about making the facets match up with each other. In fact, the the more random and natural it looks, the better...

MORE LIGHTING EFFECTS

And now it's going to start looking a little more like a crystal. The thicker the material is, the less light will pass through it. So the thicker parts of the blade will be darker blue.

I picked a shade about three or four shades darker than the original metal blue-grey and just started airbrushing the dark spots in the blade.

Then I adjusted the transparancy and set the layter to "multiply" to get the desired effect.

TRANSPARANCY EFFECTS

One thing I took a little liberty on was the transparancy of Tessaiga's blade. In the manga, the crystal Tessaiga is barely see-through. But I like the translucency of crystals like quartz and daimonds, so I decided to go for it.

At this point, I re-selected the path for Inuyasha's hakama and stroked it with a 3-point brush tool on a layer above the blade. Then using the blur tool, I started blurring the line to get the see-through effect.

The trick with this is to follow the facets of the blade just a bit, enough so that it seems natural. I also played around with the darkness of the lines before I got the effect that I wanted.

The end result is the bottom image.

THE BOY AND HIS SWORD!

The image I'm using on the right is actually jumping ahead a bit, because it has the lighting effects in it that I actually added a bit later...

But anyhow.

Again, to simulate a see-through crystal effect, I also needed to show the color of Inuyasha's hakama through the blade.

So for this, I just used the eyedropper to reselect the color of his pants, airbrushed a patch of red in on a layer above the blade, set the transparancy to about 10%, and then selected "vivid light" for the layer effect.

At this point, just have some fun and be experimental. I got many different types of effects at this point, but decided that this one was the way I wanted it.

So Inu now has his sword, and he's a happy boy.

...well, kinda.