Katara and Toph in Love

This piece is something that I did for Avatar-fan’s Non-Cannon Contest.  The idea behind the contest is to make artwork of non-cannon pairings.

Sorry Zutarian and Kataang fans but those pairings are ruled out as spelled out in the rules of the contest.

As far as the technical aspects of this particular piece, I used some of the commission pieces done for me by DarkDP who did a few for the Avatar series at my request.  Using the skin-tones that he used, I applied them to this piece, which is why the skin-tones of Katara and Toph look a little different (for those of you who have been following my work closely).

For the pose, it was something that I decided to experiment with, so I needed a pose where two people are in a tender moment of intimacy that is non-sexual in anyway.  So, I found a picture from an anime series called “Glamour” and using that pose I set about my task of making it for Toph and Katara.

Also if you look closely you’ll see that Toph is wearing a Watertribe necklace like Katara’s.  This is from an earlier work I did called KaToph Necklace.  Within the pendant itself are the flat lines and coin symbols of the Earth Kingdom, while there are the rolling waves of the Water Tribe.   Put that on a green collar and there you have a necklace that Katara would give to Toph.

As for the time that it took to make this, I think the drawing by hand took about 2 hours, the outlining in Photoshop took about 2 ½, and the final coloring took about 8 hours.   So it was a full 12 ½ hour project.

© Katara and Toph Befong - Avatar the Last Airbender – Nickelodeon – Michael DiMartino and Tim Hedrick