Tokyo Otaku Proposal

Tokyo Otaku is a Japanese culture shop in Derby's Fishmarket (so not only do they sell manga and anime but also clothes, dolls, games, cards, wall scrolls, posters, albums , furniture etc). A while ago I drew this on their wall: [link]

Wil, the mangager, was telling me recently that it gone down well with customers which explained why my page hits had gone up too. I was surprised by this as a: I can see all sorts of basic errors in the figure and b: I'd no longer class anything i'd drawn in the last two years as being in a manga style.

Currently i'm flat broke and trying to raise the capital needed to put Fecal Depot #1 into print. Wils offered to let me pitch an idea to fill his remaining wall space with and here's the B/W version of what I came up with.

It's heavily inspired by Frank Quitely's Shimura cover: [link] I altered the pose, changed the character and added a half Union Jack to the design to make clear that this is an homage rather than plagarism. Naturaly Frank's wins hands down but I'm pleased with the clean grey tones I got out of Artrage and my Wacom.

The process for this was pencils/blue line > inked printout of faded pencils > digital grey tones. It's come about looking a bit flat because I tried so hard to make it a very clean image. The pose is possible to do in reality by the way, but it looks stiff (if i'd placed the shadows on the limbs more carefully and though out where the folds in his clothes went it'd seem more plausible)