(You can download the full sized version to see it in full detail)

*pant* *pant* *wheeze*

My god. This is the fanart to end all fanart! (to me, anyway)

So I was sitting at my desk thinking of what I could draw next. I felt ambitious but nothing was coming to mind. I sketched on my tablet and thought and thought... and finally I said "Hm, why don't I draw some fanart? I hardly ever do that, and it's fairly easy to do since the character's already established".

The next question though was what KIND of fanart could I do? Could I draw some obscure anime character? Nah... Sailor Moon? Not in the mood. Fanart for the webcomics I frequent? Not right now. OH! Here's an idea! I've already drawn Cloud from FF7 several years ago (proooobably the last piece of fanart I ever did? O.o), let me draw him again to show how much I've improved since then!

So I decided to draw Cloud. No biggie - I looked up the official artwork of Nomura Tetsuya (which is gorgeous) and studied it for maybe 15 minutes, picking it apart with my eyes. The first thing I noticed right away is that the legs are more then half the length of the body. o.o; The chest area on all the characters is... really small. Which looks kinda odd for Tifa when you realize it but not terrible And I don't know if you've ever REALLY looked at the colors in this picture (Cloud's official art) but... they're hard to pinpoint. Is his outfit purple or blue? Is his glove brown or black? Or is it red? It's just this controlled chaos of hues that really made it hard on my marker collection. So many missing colors or colors that just weren't quite right (either too light or too dark or not red enough or too green, etc).

The actual DRAWING part was probably the easiest part. I sketched a rough draft in Open Canvas to get a feel for the kind of pose I wanted. I must've went through several kinds until I ended up with this one.... which in the end is pretty standard. >.> His body was no problem to draw at all, but when it came to his sword I ran into perspective issues. I ended up using a vanishing point and everything just to get the lines right in the sketch..... but then on the real thing I failed (it looks flat anyway, despite my efforts).

Once I knew what I wanted, I was ready to go to real paper. Still feeling ambitious I said "Hey! I should do the lines in pencil so they look shadey and soft - like the illustration (the official art)!"

BIGGEST... MISTAKE... EVER

Well no, not a mistake... but a NIGHTMARE that required tweak after tweak. At first I thought I was smart and used a photo-blue pencil to sketch the outline then finally I used a regular hard leaded pencil to re-draw the vital parts rather then inking it. So there! Pencil lines! The real thing doesn't look too bad in and of itself, but you can of course still see the blue lines underneath. "But it's light blue! So it shouldn't show up when I scan it!"

WRONG AGAIN

The scan not only came up with dirty pencil lines (which I should have expected anyway!) but also light but visible dirty UNDER lines from the blue pencil. Apparently when they say you have to draw lightly, they mean SO LIGHT YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE WHAT YOU'RE DOING. Either that or my scanner was being overly thorough. For once.

So I couldn't print it out right away. I had to clean it.

Cleaning wasn't absolutely terrible, but it was tedious. And then I realized I drew one arm's muscle bigger then the other. Very noticeably bigger. So noticeable that I still feel really embarrassed that I drew it like that without realizing it. I was able to fix it (mostly), but it haunts me. How could I be so careless?

Finally cleaned (and pretty nice looking) I printed it out. Luckily there were no printing hazards, but I made two copies to be on the safe side (which thankfully I didn't need to use). Finally time to color. I wanted the colors to be as close to the original colors as I could get them, but the white areas had to be foregone. I just couldn't shade them right and it wasn't worth making a mistake over. For the shadows in the skin I used light grape.... which looks alright, but I could've shaded it better. When it came to the leather belt, gloves, and suspenders that's where I couldn't quite tell what color they were. Furthermore I need a bigger variety of browns in my marker bin. >.> I actually used a ancient marker for the darker shading. It was one of the first Copic markers I ever bought that came in a starter set. I never used it because it's so dark.

For his hair I was going to do with regular yellow.... but again, I wanted to keep to the original colors. I used gold. Looks more like a realistic blond, but there's not enough color diversity looking at it now I shaded in some dark orange, but still.

His eyes bother me. >.>

His outfit was the hardest part to color, I think. I couldn't decide if it was supposed to be dark blue or some kind of purple-blue or what. Most likely it's dark, smoky indigo but I don't have a color like that so I made due with dark blue (purple would have looked atrocious).

Don't... ask me about the highlights. Like I said, I just didn't have the right colors for this. Yes, they could have been done better at least, but I did the best I could >.>

The sword blade was interesting to do. My cool grey marker seemed to suddenly gain amazing powers of graidiation with some line-age, which looks great in my opinion. I used a colorless blender for the lines and emphasized them with a black colored pencil (WHICH MAYBE IF I HAD USED ON THE LINEART IT WOULD HAVE LOOKED BETTER).

After I finished coloring the lineart was mostly blurred away. It was just too light for how dark the colors came out. So was I smart and did I used my pens to ink it? Of course not! Instead I got out a black ballpoint pen (just your average kind) and used that instead, thinking "It'll be easier then my fine tip pens because it's so much softer!"

And it IS softer and allows for some very nice effects, BUT...

IT KEEPS SMUDGING!!

It was all I could do it keep it from getting all over my hands and wiping off unintentionally on the paper! Needless to say there was alot of cleanup >.> And it was annoying to have to go over all the lines for what felt like a 3rd time, but whatever.

Scanned it, edited it, added a texture and some red effects to some edges (like in the illustration) and called it done. Looking at it now, I do like how it came out. But was it worth all that effort? I really don't think so >.> I mean, it's not like he's in some kind of actiony pose or anything dynamic - he's just standing there. Furthermore his face looks weird, his blade is crooked, the colors are-etcetcetc.

But again, I like it. Another great learning experience. But if I ever decide to do lineart like that again someone please choke me! D:

Cloud is © Square (Squarenix?) and Nomura Tetsuya (for the original design), so he's not mine or yours. This picture however was drawn by me so please don't use it without permission!

Old Fanart: [link]
(That was done 5 years ago?! Jesus I'm old)
Sketch: [link]
Lineart: [link]

EDIT: A friend of mine said the texture was just too much, and I agreed. So I made it smoother. I'm still not 100% happy with it so I might tool around with it again in the future. I also left out the red edges since I felt they were distracting. Finally, I made the background a kinda pale yellow, so the white in the image would stand out more.

EDIT 2: Ok, so I changed the textures. >.> No texture on his skin. Only on his clothes, hair and blade - of varying coarseness. Fixed various other details.