Err... yeah, that had next to nothing to do with this. A wee bit of character art for my Urban Dead character:

It's a pretty quick pencil hack job. I may retrace in ink and then color it at some point, but I'm not entirely sure about that. Overall, though, it's my best bit of pencil work to date, especially with the clothing and the overall posture (found a nice little site with assault shotgun firing stances for law enforment training that helped with that). I'mnot entirely pleased with the feet, the back one especially -- it looks as if he's rolling it. Need to work on my perspective some. Shotgun looks a bit uh, saggy, but if I ink it, that'll be fixed.

Comments, please! I didn't post this for my own amusement.

Ok, you asked for it...

There are a few things that bother me, here. Remarkably, the least of these are the feet. Honestly, the only issue I have with the feet is to ask whether he's wearing boots or sneakers. If it's boots, they look a little too much like sneakers, and if it's sneakers, then there wouldn't be a heel on 'em.

The numero uno problem that I have is the arm in the foreground. All total, you have the shoulder and the hand in essentially the right place, it's just that there is too much arm in between. Seriously. Drop your arm to your side and see where the elbow actually hits. It should fall roughly at just about the bottom of your ribcage. Now look at where his would hit were he to drop that arm. The second arm needs a little "beefing" in order to make the foreshortening work, too. You could probably get away with showing a little bit more of the upper arm behind him and have it still "feel" like a natural pose. It's probably one of those instances where you have to fudge the artwork just a little bit, even if the photo doesn't show that at all.

Next thing is the hand that is supporting the barrel of the gun. You need to turn it just a little bit to expose more of the side of the hand, because at the moment, by just seeing the thumb, we get the impression he's taking double jointed to new and exquisitely painful levels.

I suppose my only other question whether or not his torso is really that long, or is he wearing those god forsaken baggy jeans that shows miles upon miles of underwear?

Don't take any of this too harshly- I think you've got an excellent start there, and there are a lot of things that work. It's just that the few things that don't work are throwing me off.

All good criticisms, thanks. The arm, especially, I hadn't thought about. The torso, however... I'm modeling this off of myself --the hair's a dead giveaway, no?-- and my torso does in fact have proportions that are comparable, and I do wear baggy pants, but I belt them up a couple inches below my hips (no undies visible!). Yeah, I can be pretty awkward; the guys here at the hall have gotten used to hearing little "Ow!" sounds whenever I bump into stuff.

*holds eraser malevolently over drawing* Watch out for the editing, Eli!

Ne....

Well, let's see. Both your hands are kinda messed up [especially the right one, you can fix the left one pretty easily bu just readjusting the thumb I think]. The shotgun's grip is a bit short, which may be contributing to the hand problem.

Like Fury said, the arm is disproportional. At first glance, it would appear that your upper arm is too long.

I THINK your shins are too short as well. Not too sure about that. Might be just baggy clothing...

Note your stroke direction on the shoes. Your particular shading makes them look kinda flat. Also, it would appear that the 'heel' of the left foot is larger and farther away from the back than the right. This of course might just be the design of the shoe, but it looks odd to me.

p.s. Fury, my sneakers have heels! Sorta. They're really useful when I'm hanging off rough surfaces like walls or tree trunks.