22 is my very favorite, followed by 25, 27, and 21.

You guys are leaving out possibly the most famous example of a drow. I speak, of course, of Drizzt Do'Urden. :D

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Things are looking much better :D

kathym, reading your post made me realize just how differently children can be raised, even in the same areas around the same time. I don't know where you grew up, but I am 30 and I grew up in the Southeastern U.S. and I was raised to believe that nudity wasn't such a bad thing. I was taught that wearing clothing in public was respectful of others (and obviously the legal thing to do!) But my parents believe that nothing was wrong with nudity in a natural setting. Prime example... my mother's co-workers were shocked to learn that my parents had allowed me to watch "The Blue Lagoon" when I was only around five years old because of the nudity in it, but my parents thought it was a beautiful movie and that the nudity was important to the experience. I watch the movie now that I am an adult and I completely agree. I did not see anything wrong or weird with it as a child, and I still don't. I should also mention that my mother was a Southern Baptist, and I attended a Baptist church from around age 5 until age 13. She was very religious, but she still knew that "God" made our bodies and that what he made is pure and good. I feel blessed to have been raised by liberal parents, and I hope my own children feel the same someday. :)

I got a gift once, but it turned out it was an accident and they meant to buy the item for themselves. :( I have no friends. LOL

I love shadows, but I've always hated the increased render times. I just got a major computer upgrade, so maybe I will try some images with shadows sometime and see if the render time is bearable now.

I created something similar by setting the spacing to something that looked good for my particular brush, and then under Shape Dynamics I set everything to "Off" except for Angle Jitter, which I set to 0% and set it the control to "Direction." Then the best way to get everything to space out correctly is by drawing a path with the pen tool that you'd like the brush to follow and then right click the path and stroke path, set it to brush (after you've selected your brush and set the proper dynamics) and you should have a (nearly) perfect rendition. Now all you have to do is find or make a brush similar to that. If you could find a dragonfly brush it might work, although you might have to chop off most of the body and save it as a new brush.

Yeah, I agree. It definately looks like a photo with a Poser-rendered face added in postwork.

Thank you :) I hope it helps.

I don't know of any specifically that I can link you to, but here is what I like to do for that type of thing: First, when you render, make two renders. The first one on a solid grey background and just the figure. When you export that render save it as .tif format so you have an alpha channel to work with. Then render your full image with the background and figure and everything. You can save that one as .jpg format. Now, open both renders in Photoshop. Go to your solid background render and click the Channels tab. You'll see the Alpha channel there. Hold down shift and click that channel. That will make a (nearly) perfect selection of your figure. Edit:Copy that and then paste that as a new later into the full render, then save that as a PSD in case you mess anything up later. Okay, now duplicate the figure layer (just in case) and then make the first figure layer invisible. Now, you want to lock the transparent pixels on the visible figure layer. This is to make sure that you don't accidentally draw or smudge the edges out too far or anything. In order to lock the transparency, look at your layer pallet for the word lock and click the first icon beside the word lock, the white/gray checkerboard square. Now you should be able to edit this layer without accidentally going outside the figure. Okay, the first thing I do is smooth the skin. Alot of people use the smudge tool for this, but I prefer the blur tool. I choose the blur tool and then start going over all of the skin with a soft round brush at 50% blur strength. This just makes the skin smooth, helps smooth out all of the freckles and imperfections in the skin. If you want freckles, you can paint them back on later. Now, you can stop here if you like the way it looks. Sometimes the blur tool is perfectly sufficient for giving that smooth, airbrushed look. If it's not quite right, or if you want a bigger different between shadows and highlights, then you'll have to airbrush. Once the skin looks about as smooth as you want it to, duplicate that layer (precautionary measure again) and then make the older one invisible. Now, select your brush tool and turn on the airbrush feature. Set the flow to 100% and the opacity to around 15-25% (whatever feels right to you when you start to use it. I like to go pretty low.) Now, here is a great feature that alot of people don't know about with the brush/airbrush tool. You can select colors from your image by holding down ALT and clicking an area. This will help you match the colors of your image. If you want a color that is lighter or darker you can select a color and then just edit it to be a bit lighter or darker, but you'll always know you're using the right general shades if you select colors directly from the current skin. Okay, now you select a light color from the skin and start slowly going over the lightest highlights on the skin. Just enhance the highlights and make them a bit smoother. Then do the same thing with the shadows. Select a darker shade from the skin and start brushing over those areas. This will take the most time to get right. If you really have a hard time with the airbrush tool, you can "cheat" at this. Instead of using the airbrush tool, you can take your duplicated later and start dodging an burning. You will want to set the exposure on these tools very low and build them up. I like to use about 10-15% exposure so I have more control. If it's not light/dark enough with one stroke, you can make more, but if it's too bad, you have to undo, and that wastes time. Then you just use the dodge tool over the lightest areas and the burn tool over the darkest areas and you'll get that nice contrasty look that alot of airbrushed images have. I hope I explained things well enough for you to understand. I haven't really done alot of tutorial type things. Feel free to ask questions if you need help and I'll do what I can. :)

Attached Link: http://www.deviantart.com

Attached Link: http://www.deviantart.com

Wonderful, thank you so much! I love BelBel!

I don't like it, either. And I was REALLY unhappy to log in to find my wishlist and cart completely missing. Oh well, their store declines my card every time I try to order anyway, so no big deal I guess. :(

Fran, sometimes when something asks you to download to your desktop, it really just means download it to your computer. I have tried Virtual Photographer (and LOVED it) and it is installed in my Photoshop directory, not my desktop. :)