Drawing #13 - Shading Luffy in preparation for using Copic

Hello Steemit friends! 

Some time ago, my friends and I started a little drawing competition featuring the anime show, One Piece, and spontaneously nominated one of our friends as judge (we have yet to tell him that he is the judge of the competition). For the competition, that will take place Aug 20, I am drawing Luffy, the main character of One Piece and the captain of the Straw Hat Pirates; Luffy ate the gum-gum fruit which caused his body to become elastic. So when he gets ready to fight, his blood boils and you can see his skin sort of bubble. I finished most of my shading for Luffy and am almost ready to color him with copic markers. I had planned to at least color in the black background before I showed all of you, but lo and behold, I left my black copic ciao marker (I call it the abyss marker; it's the deepest black marker I've laid eyes on) at home despite having brought every other marker with me to the coffee shop I draw at. 

I have much improvement to make when it comes to drawing, but I feel I had made drastic improvements to drawing fire compared to the previous picture I had posted: 

In this above picture, you can see that my concept of how fire is structured is very elementary because the flames are very rigid like ice, rather than fluid and random. For this second picture, I had simply drawn from my own memory, not of real fire, but of fire I always see in other drawings. To make an attempt to develop my understanding and drawing of fire, I looked up images of fire and noticed that when it flickers, it has a very layered look to it and contains several shades of colors, and not just one or two colors. I am still working on learning how to shade; I would definitely say that is one of my weak points. Since Luffy is surrounded by fire, the lighting on his body is sort of off in this picture, and unfortunately, figuring out how to shade discombobulates my brain. 

Here is the drawing progress of Luffy beginning with my previous elementary flames:

I almost forgot to share this good news! This is the one part of the drawing I didn't mess up on and have to erase!:

~That's all for now, thanks for joining me!~