Eiri and Shuichi
Candlelight at Midnight

The resource image I used for this was a two and three-quarters inch square photo from rat's 1999 Playboy Hardbodies mag. The subject matter of the photo was two women and I just changed them to two somewhat muscular men.

This is pretty much straight-forward pencilwork with stumps used for the smearing. As usual, the initial work was laid down with an F pencil. The darker areas were made with 2B and 4B pencils while the fine lines of the hair were made with an 8H pencil. The combination of the soft pencils and the sketch paper caused the interesting texture in the dark sections. Of course, the large version is more in focus. These little thumbnails are fuzzy.

I have a tendency of making the boys more muscular than what people typically consider their frames. It's left-over from the DBZ days.

Since I was not happy with how the pencil scanned this time, I decided immediately to add colour. I prefer using PS6 when using the airbrush and the tablet because I have more control. I haven't been able to figure out how to get the same kinds of settings in PS7. I like airbrushing the hair so I worked on the majority of the main colouring in PS7 then moved over to PS6 for the detail work.

I added the dark blue to help pull the background together more and I think the colour helps pull the skin shading together better as well.

Most people actually prefer the simple pencil version of this drawing over the colour version.