Eiri and Shuichi
Sex

Now this piece has a bit of history, because it took so long to finish it and it has both my old style of drawing the Gravi boys along with my recent style of cg colouring. It is also the first explicit sexual pic I have drawn.

The original drawing was begun in early March, 2003. I used no resources for the pose, which now I can see is really off when it comes to how Shuichi is 'plugged into' Eiri. The bodies are longer and thinner than what I draw now. You can see the same style with my first Gravi work, when I was practicing getting away from the beefy Dragonball Z bodies I had been drawing before. It took a month to finally make the decision to ink this and it was a sloppy job with only one ink thickness. A lot of Japanese white ink touch-ups had to be done to the drawing.

I know the faces are not very representative of the boys and the only thing that is even remotely designating who is who here and that this pic is supposed to be a Gravi fanart is the hair colours. I decided it was important to post this anyway because it chronicles the progression of where I was at one time drawing the Gravi boys.

The drawing sat in the sketchbook until early January, 2005, when the decision to finally sign off on it occurred. This drawing was in the same pad I used for the Saiyuki drawing so I signed off on both on the same day.

This was scanned in at 72 dpi and cleaned up a little more so the scan "chatter" was gone and the parts of the whites were not such a dull dove grey.

All my playing in oekaki paid off when it came to colouring the skin and hair in Photoshop 7. I pulled up my custom swatches, which has a lot of skintones I have sampled from various graphics and lots of E&S hair colour chips I have sampled from fanart and graphics.

Originally the skintones were done with only two colours and straight cel shading. It did not look very good so I added at least three more skintones to each body and used the smudge tool to blend the tones together. Doing oekaki for as long as I have and the techniques I have learned from various oekaki experiments really helped with the colouring the skin of this piece.

The pillows were done with various solid colour and pattern fill layers. The bright orange pillow also has a filter. The bed headboard has a wood pattern fill with colour adjustment to make it darker. The wall has another pattern fill which was lightened.

The sheet was done with a pattern fill layer and another layer for some of the shadows and highlights. Other shadows/highlights were done on the pattern fill layer. The sheet pattern layer was made extra large, then transformed so the lines would show perspective.

The 3-D effect of the windows were done two different ways. The vertical shadows were made by drawing the shape on the wall layer with the polygon lasso tool and using Brightness/Contrast to darken the section slightly. Each of the horizontal shadows were put on a separate layer. A large rectangle of the wall texture was made and copied. Each layer was transformed so the angle of the grain met with the perspective. The shape of the window sill was drawn with polygon lasso tool, then the selection was inverted so when the delete key was pressed the textured sill shape was left.

The outside background is actually three photos 'stitched' together in Photoshop. I took these photos in Hawaii back in 1990.