#wintermint

The young woman smiled and quietly shut the door. Days like this made everything feel so right, and yet she still felt so unsure. But right now maybe she could just… pretend.

She tip-toed her way to the kitchen. After spending the day with her father, she felt confident in her ability to make something. Her cooking wouldn’t compare to Bucky’s yet without supervision, but that was okay. They all had had worse things to eat.

It felt so normal, so… perfect. By the time anyone had woken up to join her, she had nearly finished making dinner.

“Hey, didn’t know you were home at first,” Mia yawned. She blinked when she realized what Stef was doing. “You made dinner?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Stef turned off the stove once it was done cooking and peeked over.

“That’s great, Stef. Thanks.” Coming closer, she looked at the other woman’s face and asked, “What’s wrong? You’re frowning. Was it supposed to be a surprise?”

“No, sorry. Just… I forgot I was a single parent for a few minutes, that’s all.”

“Stef…”

“Sorry,” she said again, going to a cabinet to start getting plates.

Mia watched her. “You still think you aren’t with us?”

“I do live with you,” Stef replied.

“No.” Mia blushed and glanced away. “I mean, really with us. You even let Clint in the bed with us now.”

“He’s your husband.”

With a shake of her head, Mia gave a sigh. “Honey, we thought you actually wanted to be a part of us. Otherwise you’d be in a separate room.”

“You really mean it?”

“I do. I’ve always meant it, Stef. I would never lie to you about how I feel - and neither would Clint.”

“O-oh. Okay.”

“So… um.”

“Uh, food’s done.”

“Yeah.” Nodding, Mia added, “I’ll get Clint, and -”

“We’ll talk more later?” Stef finished for her.

“Yeah. But we actually will, not just say we will and then don’t like your parents do. Anyway, I’m gonna go get him.” Mia left the kitchen to go grab Clint.

Stef stood there holding plates while she thought about what Mia said. Did she really want to believe this could all be real? Yes. But did she think that was going to be the case?

I wasn’t happy with the way I currently cell-shade models and thought this would be a perfect excuse to experimented a bit with shader nodes. With some trial and error I found a way to mix two different textures together for the lights and shadows. Her model isn’t affected by lighting, but instead uses lights to tell if she should use her darker color palette or her lighter color palette for any given point on her model.

Basically her model defaults to her “shadow” textures, which are darker colors. But anywhere that she’s hit by a light source it then instead uses her “light” textures upon rendering. This system gives me complete control as I get to manually assign every color, as well as do neat tricks like with the lines in her hair.