This drawing turned into a 'stages' piece, where I actually scanned and showed the piece in-progress to Gravitation fans at the LiveJournal community, gravi_muse_meet.

I worked from a photo of two long-haired women in. rat's 1999 Playboy Hardbodies magazine.

I find scanning an in-progress image and shrinking it down helps me see what is wrong with a drawing.

I had to add most of E's upper arm because it was covered with hair in the photo. The forearm and hand was easily visible in the photo.

The notes I made on the scan are pretty self-explanatory.

The image here shows the progression with the overlay/underlay. The blue are the new lines, the yellow the old lines. You can now see how I moved the arms over about a half inch to the right. to get them more in line with the bodies.

Soon I realized the photo I was working from and the drawing I was making were actually from two entirely different perspectives. I have a tendency to 'flatten' drawings to avoid perspective and foreshortening. I had turned this particular photo so I could get the eyes straight and the faces lined up correctly and I had just continued to draw with the photo turned. That angle suggests a different angle than the perspective in the photo proper. So I was fighting two perspectives. Once I got E's body twisted around so his back was now flat on the surface of the paper the lines shaped up better.

The cross-hatching eventually turned into stumped shading.

For those wanting to know how I coloured the lines here, all the colouring was done in Photoshop. I pasted both the old and new scans into a new RGB colour file, made the top layer's layer mode to Multiply so the white is knocked out and you can see the lines of the layer below. Then I adjusted the colours of the two layers using Hue/Saturation to two different colours so you can tell the old drawing from the new drawing.

Here you can see I changed S's hand to match the new perspective. The model for the hand was my own, which was a little awkward because I am left-handed. I had to look at my hand, attempt to remember what I saw, then draw it. I use my own hands for models enough I am somewhat used to doing this, but it really slowed down the process.

You can also see E's new body perspective, flat against the mattress of the bed.

The drawing is actually in #F pencil and smeared using stumps. The bedclothes were coloured with a 3B. Some of E's hair strands are defined with an 8H.

My critique:

Both boys have sweetly contented looks on their faces. They are both happy being where they are, snuggled into each other.

S's head is too small and it looks like he is missing the back of his head because I was trying to show it was tucked farther back and between the arms. I suspect if I added some hair to the back of S's head everything would look better.

E looks good. I like the gentle intensity and possessiveness in his eyes. I like showing him happy.