Death Note Fanart

I drew a recent fanart and I ended up taking some snapshots of the work in progress that I thought I'd share. I know that I enjoy seeing the progression of other artist's work, I'm just pretty self-conscious really about my own art and I feel like documenting the progression too closely is like a jinx that the end product will turn out badly!

For this documentation of the piece's progression to be truly complete, I should have two other pictures on here. From the beginning I had a clear concept, but before the actual drawing even began I created a rough (and I don't exaggerate when I say "rough") sketch of my idea on my handy whiteboard - a pre-drawing, if you will, just testing the visual layout and effect. When I felt satisfied with that, I moved to roughing out a sketch on paper (the second picture missing) of the characters and their key features. I do this prior to filling in all the details - sketching in aspects of the characters that serve as landmarks for the later proportions to come. The drawing is still very rough and vague-looking at that stage, but funny enough my cousin happened to be around at that point in the artwork's progression and was able to guess from my curves and circles I was creating a Death Note piece (which I was pretty impressed with).

After the rough sketch, I moved in and start darkening lines and filling in features and details. I originally planned to execute this piece as a watercolor painting, so I built the work as a line drawing (which I would have then filled in with watercolors had I gone that route). This was the result:

But, realizing that I STILL haven't purchased a board and tape for properly stretching watercolor paper (and being quite frustrated with the warping of my last painting), I decided to take the digital coloring route. My lazy option (haha, if you can call hours upon hours of effort lazy). When I do digital paintings, part of what I consider to be my "style" is to maintain the strong texture of a traditional pencil drawing. So I proceeded to detail and shade the drawing with my pencil:

After pencil shading, I scanned the drawing and cleaned up the scanned pencil image on Photoshop. I then spent about 13 hours (over 3 days) coloring, adjusting colors, adding or correcting elements, and perfecting the background (I'm a perfectionist. You don't even want to know how long I spend on fixing photos). I struggled the most with getting the background to work in a way that felt perfect with the piece and the shading on the "apple-head." There were also some proportion problems I came to see in my original drawing which I fixed as well.

The end result is this:

Ta-dah! The finished piece - I titled it "Juicy."

~md

Death Note, Yagami Light, and Ryuk © Viz