Made ENTIRELY in Adobe Illustrator, this thing was a royal pain in the ass to shade. (I used Gradient Mesh, not a brush.)

This was a college project for Computer Illustration class. The goal was to practice Gradient Mesh, one of Illustrator's most powerful and most difficult tools. Those of you following me on Twitter have seen my lamentations on GRMesh's difficulty It was a labor of love to be sure.

My Twitter followers will also be aware that I've been rambling about this for a few weeks now. Just to give you an idea of what kind of monstrosity this was to make, this was a timed exercise (as part of a class requirement, we must time ourselves while making projects so that we can log how many hours it takes to do stuff.) and according to my work journal, this took 17.5 hours to make. I shit you not. That's an entire day with very little sleep's worth of work on just this alone. Needless to say, I won't be doing vector art very often

Why the critique flag? Hopefully someone familiar with Illustrator will swing by and maybe give me a few pointers. As for everyone else, go for everything BUT the shading unless you're familiar with Gradient Mesh. It's not as easy as it looks. Twitter followers (might) have seen the WIP shots with the mesh overlays, and can attest to how weird that tool is.

Oh, and look! Bismark has claws on his fingers and toes now :3 Almost all of my characters shall have those now, as well as pads on their fingers and palms.