Eiri and Shuichi - 2004 Xmas Card
Happy Holidays!

This was the planet's Xmas card for 2004.

The idea was purely mine, with no references used. Originally I thought to have S dancing around the living room in a reindeer costume and yelling, "Boku wa tonakai da!" (I'm a reindeer!) with E sitting on the couch in the background, smoking and looking disgusted. As I began the sketch, I realized I would do better doing portraits over full bodies for this, so I turned the page of the sketchpad, started sketching on a new piece of paper and the result is this drawing.

S came together immediately. S is such a happy person so whatever I do to him he just lets me, and gladly. The costume came out looking cuter than I originally had planned, probably because of the person inside it!

E kept fighting me. He did not want to be in a complete Santa suit and the pencil kept not getting it right, so I changed it to a turtleneck and the fight was over. His eyes originally did not have the right amount of resignation for the situation he had been talked into, yet again, by his lover. Curving the outer edges of the eyes down gave me the expression I was looking for. He looks like he is a little disgusted, yet has given up the fight and is now just going along because he cannot fight it anymore. Poor Eiri! *laugh*

I used the usual #F pencil for the sketch then inked with 07, 05, 01 and 005 Staedtler pigment liners. This time I scanned the drawing in at 300 dpi and did a LOT of cleanup work using Photoshop 7.0. I made a layer copy of the final cleanup and placed it in the uppermost layer, then changed the layer mode to Screen so all the white was knocked out and I could work under it without disturbing the lines.

Each little piece of shading and fill was done on separate layers to have better control over each fill and opacity choice. This image has a total of 33 used layers. Some layers ended up not being used.

The skin shadings, mouth shadows, bell shadows, E's hair and misc. other shadows were done by painting various web-safe greys on new layers then taking the opacity down to around 30%.

Next, I added the various built-in pattern screentones to the reindeer costume, Santa hat, hoof, bell harness and antlers. Many of the screentones' opacities were adjusted to between 20% and 60%. I scratch-built the pattern for the turtleneck using a shape provided in PS as a base and using the offset option to make a tile. It is at about 40% opacity. The lighter 'chest' of the the reindeer was done by using the eraser tool at about 70% opacity so the original texture was still seen.

Gradients were made for E's eyes and S's hair. A black to clear gradient was used to make the folds in the turtleneck and the insides of the reindeer ears.

Japanese, translation, signature, date, copyright and website texts were all added at the end and the 2004 card was done.

This was saved at 300dpi. Four small images were placed in a Word doc and the doc was printed on white with multicolour flecks postcard stock to send as Xmas postcards.