Well, I did this almost a year ago, but since I like, haven't drawn much lately I may as well put it here to try and pad out my gallery a bit. Also I've heard it's apparently quite popular or something. So you might have seen it before. D=

But yeah, I've got this up on my DA account (Rapid-the-hedgehog there) as well, too.

I had to make a difficult decision when shading Gaomon. My natural instinct is to try and mimic the official style of the anime as closely as possible. However, the shading style in the show is generally quite minimal and doesn't use much shadow. But, I really wanted to give Gaomon a bit more depth... so I decided to use a greater level of shading.

Initially, I had some trouble deciding on a colour for the sky; Gaomon is blue. The Ocean is blue. If I used a blue sky as well, I was worried that the picture might turn out too blue. I thought of maybe trying a sunset, because using an orange sky would make Gaomon stand out more, and probably add a little more nostalgia to the piece, but then I decided that a sunset would make all the other colours in the picture look off.
I wanted to make sure the leaves were both over something, to give a bit more depth to the piece, so I deliberately made sure that they were slightly covering both part of Gaomon's bandana and the reflection of the sun in the ocean.

Finally, I should have planned out the positioning of the background a little better... there's actually a floating green cube behind his left ear that I kinda wanted visible.