Koopa Sketch

UPDATE: I've completely gone over it with my new colouring technique in Manga Studio and I must admit the colours look MUCH better now. Compared to the old one the colours really pop. And I learnt a bit about colour composition while doing it.

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As usual, there's a story behind this. This piece wasn't meant to take nearly as long as it did to finish. It was supposed to be the start of a "daily draw" challenge that I thought I'd adopt. But then things kept happening and I was forced to put this off. My life is going in a few different directions right now and I don't know if I'll have time to spend hours on end making really pretty pictures. By the time I get to the colouring stage I'm so sick of the picture that I do a botched job of it (I'm a perfectionist during the rough drawing stages). For this one I used a quick and dirty technique in Manga Studio (but it will also work in Photoshop and I guess Gimp but don't take my word for it) that works, but obviously doesn't produce the same results you'd get if you focused on each individual area and rendered accordingly for light source and texture.

I'm going to have to come up with some better time management strategies (or adopt faster techniques for inking and colouring). Right now I'm adopting better writing habits than drawing habits. I'm trying to develop some written material that might be good enough to publish, but I can't put that stuff up on DA (I'm slowly getting into the swing of it. My first step will be writing a few stories for fun and using Wattpad to share them).

Anyway. The joke here was much funnier when I first thought of it. At the time I was so sick of people equating infringement of copyright with stealing, and people assuming that all pirates were criminals who only wanted content for free, instead of taking the time to consider (or even ask) the reasons why people pirate (there are reasons other than price). For some reason it instantly made me think back to the Super Mario Bros 3 cartoon. King Koopa's daughter Kootie Pie (or Wendy as she's known in the games) wanted America for her birthday. The very first actual line in the episode is "But Kootie Pie, we plundered the whole Mushroom Kingdom to find you the best gift a koopa could steal".

So yeah. That's pretty much how this whole piece got started. And I wanted to see if I could make 90s cartoon King Koopa look badass. And if you're wondering where his tail is, I tried to put it in, but it didn't look right. So I made the throne like Sully's armchair in Monsters Inc. It has a hole in the back for his tail to poke through.