Be my valentine - FINISHED

Ninomiya Kazunari
(Japanese actor/singer, member of Japanese band Arashi)
graphite pencils on sketchbook 7" x 9.5"

(please click for full view!)

IT'S FINALLY FINISHED!!!! YAY!!!!
You can view a detail scan of the face here [link]

This was from the March '09 issue of Duet. There were pictures of each Arashi member holding a heart while the rest of the members were doing some goofy poses in the background. I'm not drawing the background, but if you're an Arashi fan, I think you'd want to see the original reference for this. Sho and Ohno were doing some funny muscle poses while Aiba and MatsuJun were laughing at them. lol


I'm bored, so I figured I'd try something a little different this time. I'm going to post my work in progress in a single submission and just keep updating it as I go along. If you're online while I'm working on this, then you'll see the progress!

WIP#1: Face has been drawn and hair has been blocked in and partially shaded. The rest of the body has been roughly sketched in.

WIP#2: Finished shading the hair

WIP#3: Adjusted facial skin tones, started shading his sweater and part of the plush heart.

WIP#4: Added a background, minor tweaks on skin tones, shaded more of heart and sweater. (Note: the scan is deceiving. The gray tones are not really all that dark!)

WIP#5: The lack of the likeness was starting to bother me, so I made some MAJOR CHANGES! I erased and redrew the eyes, took out about half an inch off the hair at the top, lifted out some of the shading on the face and adjusted shape of face. I think it's starting to look more like Ninomiya now.

WIP#6: Re-drew the eyebrows, nose and mouth and redid the shading of the face. Probably won't be noticeable to most people, but I think these changes made the resemblance much more striking. I also widened the body and the plush heart a bit.

WIP#7: Finished shading the plush heart, almost done with the arm holding the heart. That hand is hard to shade! No matter how I shade it, it still looks somewhat deformed. The combination of folds, stripes and texture on the sweater sleeve is quite a challenge. That's why it's taking a while for the updates.

FINAL UPDATE: finished shading the jeans, sweater, other arm and background. I also extended the background on the right a little bit because it seemed somewhat cramped before.