Here’s a sneak peak at an upcoming concept for Halloween shirts on Pandaline:

I’ve had the Vampire Panda character since the early 2000′s. He appears throughout many of my sketchbooks (which the general public often doesn’t see). I figured with the re-launch of my t-shirt store, it’s time to finally make a design with him.  I’ll be working with this image in Illustrator over the next week or so.

Also wanted to share a fanart that I started back in March. I finally finished it about a month ago. This is Crimson Viper, from Capcom’s Street Fighter 4.

Here’s a look at the evolution of the piece:

I started this when my friend Jimmy Tran posted some fanart of the same character. I thought her design was a little bit ridiculous, so I figured I’d draw something to make a little fun of that ridiculousness.

The concept of the drawing was to show the character getting ready to kick some @$$, as Street Fighters are known to do on a regular basis.  My visual idea was to really highlight her “assets.” I thought her little tie that was tucked within her “assets” was especially ridiculous, so I set out to emphasize that idea as well.  You can see that as I progressed, I changed my mind (I guess it was just too ridiculous for me, and it just didn’t gel that well with me).  I also wanted to practice my painting skills a little bit, and was hoping to go all-out on the rendering.

Months went by, and I lost a little bit of steam.  Finally, I just settled on the final version that you see initially.  Not quite how I imagined it, but realistically I knew I was not motivated to go any further on it.

I have to say I do enjoy telling the story behind the art!