Sketch Trade at Anthrocon 2006 with  ZenMigawa, depicting his character toying with a RoboSapien 2 (I don't think the real one will say what I have it saying, but you never know :D).

At first, I had a tough time figuring out just how to do his character justice, and it was getting late, so I let the mental gears grind overnight. Come morning, inspiration struck, and I was able to combine the character with his keen interest in robots. After using the hotel's wireless to scour the Web for reference pics, I got the pencils down in about 35 minutes, with another hour or so to do the bruch inks. In return, I got a 'kick butt now and take names later' rendition of my Tanya proclaimimg her awesome table tennis skillz.

Now for a llittle technical stuff. The image you see here differs from the original ink drawing I did back at the con. I'm sure Zen will back this up after comparing the two. Since the India ink sort of sits on top of the paper and is a bit on the shiny side, it tends to reflect light coming off the scanner, causing the brush marks to stand out while lightening the linework. Correcting that took a few minutes in my usual art app. The thing that took most of the evening was performing digital surgery on the pic to improve stuff I thought could use improvement (I'm just like that--I ain't a master of the art, so I latch onto whatever improvements I can eke out after the fact). So what got tweaked? Among other things, the cheek contour was modified as it looked a tad chunky in the original, hair arrangement was made more symmetrical, eye shape and seperation was improved, and additional detail around the eye markings added.

On the RoboSapien, I noticed that the bellows covering his shoulder joints was asymmetrical--the one on his left arm had two folds and the one on the right had three. I digitally drew in the missing fold, and fixed all the white outlines within the solid blacks, as well as adding highlights to the cables on the robot arms. To finish things off, I stripped out the hand-drawn crosshatching and substitued greyscale to smooth things out.

Project ID: 79