So my initial purpose of this image was mostly I just wanted to draw something with extremely high contrast. I have a tendency to try and stick to very subtle shading methods, where the darkest and lightest tones really aren't that far apart. But at the same time a lot of my more favorite drawings tend to have very high contrast shading, where there is a huge difference between light and shadow. Originally I was thinking of something along the lines of drawing them in an shinigami-outfit from Bleach, even looked up a reference for what those would look like. And was thinking of having some sort of spelll being cast to provide very strong light. And then when I started drawing I liked how the muscle definition was turning out so just kept them in the buff as it were. And made it more of a sword fight between the two. And then decided I wanted to make their swords on fire because why not and then made it a thunderstorm to hide the fact that I can't draw good backgrounds and wanted to play with filters.

So yeah, pretty much a drawing that started simple and kind of got more complicated due to feature creep. And to some degree I like how some things turned out, but at the same time other things not liking nearly as well. The anatomy is weird but that's normal. Also still hate my background work. Overall drawing time was 1.5 hours sketch, 3.85 hours color for a total time of 5 hours, 9 minutes.