To some MF’in FANART! I’ve done a whoole lot of drawing over the last couple of months, but nothing I can post right now. So this weekend I decided to put together some fanart for my favorite new obsession: Muramasa! I decided on Kisuke, since I haven’t finished Momohime’s story yet. I promise I’ll draw pretty ninja girls too.

As an added bonus and an apology for being away so long, I’ll walk you through some process. Since I am, however, entirely into instant gratification, here’s the finished piece first. You can hit the jump below if you want to see how I put things together.

Kisuke from Muramasa, lookin all stabby. Click for big!

Yay now for some self indulgence!

First off, I scanned the pencils since I always forget to do that before I go in with the ink. I keep mine pretty tight to the finished product so that I can remember what it is i was trying to get across when I started drawing. Red Prismacolor Colorerase are way better than those nasty old light blues and that is a fact.

I started with my nib pen and realized that the paper i was using bled when ink so much as got near it. So I switched over to a Prismacolor ink pen and just tried to vary my line weights. The nice thing about the red pencil is that once you’ve got your lineart scanned, you can play with Levels to make the black and white standout, then use Channel Mixer on the Black/White w/ Red Filter setting. It’ll pull the pencils out entirely and leave you with clean art.

After that I flatted in some colors. I actually flatted Kisuke in purple but I guess I merged his skintone layer onto the flat layer before I could save it so you’ll notice his skin actually has some detail on it. I wanted to keep his gi or whatever a single color so it’s all based on the same purple except for the stripe on the front. All his other colors are pretty much just the ones from his original game art. I threw a simple circle gradient in the background.

I did all the shadow in a blue that I made from the snow color and then Hue/Saturated down since it needed to be a little darker. It’s all done with a paintbrush tip with Opacity Jitter control turned on. I set that layer to Multiply and shadows appear! I started with Kisuke because I wanted him to be darker than his surroundings. Then I did a separate layer for the background.

Next I worked on the highlights and ground texture. The colors are pulled directly from the sky, drawn in with the same opacity-jitter paintbrush tip. I then went over with a very low opacity light grey to add some extra ambient light. Finally I stuck in a spotty texture on the ground in its own separate Color Burn layer so it would look a little more icy.

The final act was changing the outline layer to a dark purplish-blue because it looked radical. Throw all that stuff together and you got a ninja! bam.