Ryu: Getting ready for a fight

This is a fan art digital painting of Ryu, a character from Street Fighter. Ryu is my favourite character from Street Fighter even though I’m lousy at the game.

Since it’s a fan art and not my own creation, I tend to view it as a practice piece. When I started drawing this picture, I set out to accomplish a few things:

• Do everything digitally
• Get used to using the Wacom tablet
• Practice and find my own style in colouring
• Draw my own version of Ryu from memory

I did everything using Gimp and my Wacom graphire 3 tablet, from sketching to the colouring. I think I’m getting more used to using a tablet even though I still find it easier to draw on paper. When I sketched out Ryu, I decided not to give him any facial features such as eyes, nose and mouth because these are the hardest to draw and I don’t want to spend too much time on them. I’m still not very used to drawing on a tablet and I don’t know whether I’m proficient enough to do such detailed work. So in the end I put his face in shadows.

I wanted to give Ryu a more interesting pose than just standing there. Since he is from a fighting game, the logical conclusion is to put him in a fighting pose but it felt kind of boring to me. I wanted something that was not commonly used but at the same time, not too hard to draw and had a bit of movement. After playing with a few ideas, I decided to do a pose of Ryu getting ready for a fight. I used his clothes to add a feeling of movement to the picture. Since there were so many versions of Ryu, I used his clothes to identify him. I drew him mostly from memory, only checking to make sure that I had his clothing correct.

I’m a drawer, not a painter and I don’t really like colouring but in this piece, I tried to do everything in colour, shades and tones, even forgoing the black outline that I am used to. I think the result was not bad. It was only after I finished colouring Ryu, then I chose the background colour. It took me a while to decide. I can’t pick white as Ryu is dressed in white; black is too black and grey is dull. In the end I settled on dark red and I used some grunge brushes to make the background more interesting.

I started this painting in January and I only just completed it. Even though the painting was only just finished, I could already see some mistakes.

First of all in the News: Final Fantasy: Dissidia!

This treat is apparently part of the 20^th anniversary commemoration of the FF franchise- in fact news about it was out in May.. but I’ve only just read about it- so bit of a delayed reaction here

Now news about Dissidia-specifically the inclusion of Final Fantasy IX characters- is getting me pumped for a few reasons. 1)FF IX always seemed –undeservedly- a bit of an ‘unloved child’ to me and it’s one of my long time gaming wishes come true to see the creators finally giving it a nod by giving Zidane and Kuja an outing in Dissidia. 2)I am a Kuja fan. J 3)While having Kuja is sweet, having Zidane AND Kuja is just puts the icing on the cake. *Major FFIX plot spoiler: highlight to read.* To me those two are like the InuYasha and Sesshoumaru of Final Fantasy- just gotta love the..ahem… extremely volatile sibling rivalry thing going on there =D

Well then, what better to commerate the occasion than a celebratory picture? And I had just the image in storage too: all penciled and cleaned up,  just lacking that final burst of energy to color and spit and polish and what better time than now.