Phew!

Looooong day! Started with a job offer and ended with teriyaki steak!
Unfortunately not a concept art job, though I'm not applying for those till after my holiday in Florida. Nope, this is a lovely summer job at a store in my town, have my interview on Wednesday, wish me luck!
I'd barely put the phone down when my best friend Steentrain came to pick me up for our first day out together in far too long. We went up to Xscape, where we usually go snowboarding (not been able to do any yet this summer, hoping to go within the next month) where there's also a load of restaurants, sports shops, an arcade, bowling alley, and a cinema, which on this occasion was our destination.
Long story short, we had a movie day and saw both the new Pirates of the Caribbean and X-Men: First Class. The former having a lot of great one-liners but an ultimately disappointing end (what the HELL happened with the mermaid?) and the latter being a very fun movie with some nice action scenes, and enough in it to have me and Steeny contemplating about it the whole journey home. Neither of us particularly enjoyed the comic-style montage and felt it took away from the film more than it added, but it probably didn't help that we had a kid behind us asking his parents what was happening as opposed to watching what was going on...
ANYWAY!
One of my favorite things to do (usually before movies, but this time after as we got into PoTC:4 25 minutes late) is check out the movie posters, to have a sneak peak of what's coming out in the next few months but also to see how different movies go about advertising themselves.
This interest continued when I got home as I checked out a few classic movie posters, and then I noticed something...interesting.
It began with this:

Obviously a very famous piece, but I found it a bit..eerie when I looked over it this time. Carrying on my search, I quickly discovered the reason for my unease:

 Ofcourse! The strong male lead holding up a line of pure light in a straight line into the air with a seemingly submissive female at his side, surely a great solution for a movie cover!
Except...
Well...
I don't believe it is. The point of the straight line is to create an incredibly dynamic image in which I believe symmetry would appear much more powerful. The image fading to black is a common theme across both but the second character takes away from this and rids the image of it's solo-superhero look that a singular character would. In my hope for a more pure version of this, I was thankful I had my movie-going from earlier in the day to provide me with a good place to start...

Perfect! A much more powerful image, showing off Cyclops to his full strength here. The fade to black is more prominent here than in the previous two images with the glowing fog providing an ample background for his legs to be drawn against. But while I feel much happier with my little search, having found what I believe to be a much purer 'poster' than the previous two (I'm fully aware this latter image isn't from a poster) I'm left with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth from the  'submissive' women used in the prior images. And this all lead me to my picture for today!

Portrayed above is Noel Vermillion from BlazBlue!

I WOULD write up a little post about working on this piece, but I'm actually giggling quite a lot at the moment due to a mistake I made halfway through. 

Right, to save my back before I get dubbed a certain kind of artist! Here's the manuscript, taken from Steam, of my conversation with The Boy (name changed here) which best describes what I was thinking...

Krillatron: Did her in her 2-guns, one point up, one down pose
Krillatron: And they're both shooting
Krillatron: And I thought a cool energy ray would look cool
Krillatron: So the down one's hitting the floor
Krillatron: And I thought, hitting the floor? Lets have sparks and stuff coming off!
Krillatron: And have it all glowing and stuff
Krillatron: Only...
Krillatron: It looks like she's peeing.
TheBoy: that's brilliant!
TheBoy: :D
Krillatron: I have the foresight of a lump of marzipan