This piece is an experiment in many ways. First of all I used the face and general idea of a real person when forming the pictue (Can you see Liam Neeson?), secondly I used some of the elements of clothing from my How To Draw MANGA: Male Characters. The muscles in this case were largely a combination of practice and memorization but I did check against a couple of sources I've got around. Lastly the sword was drawn with a new five step technique I found on the interwebs that starts with the sillhouette of the item first and fills in details. It works well for me as I'm not great with rulers although I did finally use a ruler. Also, non photo pencils still rock most hard.