Tenchi Muyo Budweiser Girls

This image celebrates the two greatest things in life - the Tenchi Muyo series and Budweiser beer.

Ok, how do I start? This is the first Tenchi Muyo “fan art” that I’ve made. I guess every piece of artwork has a story behind it and this one is no exception. Actually it’s three stories so I’m breaking it up.

PART ONE:
THE BUDWEISER GIRLS
I guess the story begins way back when a friend of mine gave me this kick ass poster of the Budweiser Girls posing on a beach towel. The towel has the Budweiser emblem and each one of the girl’s bathing suites matched whatever part of the towel they were on. I thought to myself - “This has got to be the best image EVER created!” As time went by I eventually lost my beloved Bud Girls poster, I mourned this for many a moon. Until one day I found the poster shoved in box with a bunch of other crap! I was so happy to find my Bud Girls. But time had done its damage to my beloved poster. I thought to myself “I can’t hang this over the spool. What am I going to do?”
END OF PART ONE

PART TWO:
THE TENCHI FACTOR
In 1998 I was just learning the art of computer animation. I had a set regimen; I would work from this to that time, take a break at this time, and then work onto midnight. During my breaks there was always this show on the Cartoon Network called Tenchi Muyo. I’ve never been a big fan of anime and this was no exception, but there was nothing else to watch on TV, so I tolerated it. Well, weeks passed, and then months and my opinion of the show still hadn’t changed. Until one day, like a bolt of lighting, I got into the show; all of a sudden I understood it. Now I’ve never really been a fan of anime (and am still not), but this show was different, this was not anime – this was a story that, somehow, I could get into. I eventually found myself watching ever show (even Tenchi in Tokyo – eek!), buying every DVD, downloading every song and image I could find, and even … reading fan fiction! But, sadly, the Tenchi series went off the air, it seemed that I had all the images and songs, only a few Tenchi sites were still up, and how many fan fictions can you really read about Ryoko and Ayeka having a lezbo relationship till you get bored. The well had been pumped dry. The only other logical conclusion I could come to was that, if I wanted to see the characters again, I would have to create them myself or wait until someone else did it.
END OF PART TWO

PART THREE:
THE WORK
Ok, now sense you know the back-story, I can go on and explain the painting. I was setting there looking at my torn up Bud Girls poster and thinking of what I was going to do. Then the thought came to my head – “hey, you’re an artist. Why don’t you just make another one?” So I planned for my next project to be the recreated Bud Girls poster. But, since I was going to do a painting anyway, why don’t I combine it with the Tenchi art that I was thinking about making and make the most KICK ASS IMAGE KNOWN TO MAN!!!
The first thing I had to do was to, of course, sketch it. Now I’m only going to say this once! – I don’t trance. I had to make some slight modifications to the girl’s body, for that “anime” style. The poster had 3 girls so I had to pick which of the Tenchi girls to use. Ayeka (or Aeka) would definitely be given center seat because she is, by far, my favorite. Ryoko, though I’m not a big fan of her, had to be put in just for the fact that she has the most fans and I would be killed if I didn’t. Technically I wanted this to be an OVA only image, so that would mean that the third girl had to be Washu, Sasami, or Mihoshi. Both Washu and Sasami were too young and Mihoshi was too dumb. My second favorite Tenchi character is Kiyone so, even though she’s from the “Universe” series, I decided to use her. Being that I have just about every image on the web and the DVD’s to go by, I had a ton of reference images to go by. I found a good image of Ayeka to go by, but I couldn’t seem to find a decent image of Kiyone or Ryoko in the head pose I was looking for, so I had to make it up from the images that I did have. The first problem you hit when drawing anime is that the character’s change so much from OVA’s, TV shows, and Movies, which one do you use as your base reference? I choose the OVA’s.
Once I had it all draw out, I scanned it and the started to work. This was the first time that I tried creating a piece of work like this, so it took a couple of times to get some of the problems worked out. I searched the web and found a couple of sites that told, in good detail, how to create that “anime” style of characters with Photoshop (which is what I use). So I finally figured that it was best to use the Path tool to do the lines and then use the Fill tool for the colors and shadows, basically the girls and towel was all done this way. For the Budweiser emblem I was going to cheat and download an image off the net, but I couldn’t find one so I ended up having to recreate that, as well as all the wording (which was down with the PS text tool, their not exact but I doubt anyone will ever tell). A copy of the emblem and words were made and parented to the bathing suits and then deformed to give the appearance of clothe. The sword was done with the airbrush. The planks were done with two colors using the Smudge tool and then I used black lines with the Emboss effect to create the seam. The bottle was painted in the same way the girls were.

Well that’s it, not much to it. I was never planning on show this to anyone; I was just going to take it to the local printer and have a poster made for my place. But after spending over thirty hours on it, I came to the conclusion that I was going to show it to someone. I’m pretty happy with it and it definitely won’t be my last Tenchi image.