Psylocke

Ref. Psylocke. Marvel Comics, New York, New York. 2010.
Ref. Pose-WARNING-NUDE IMAGE [link]

So I had Elektra in mind when I started this but since I went with her on a previous submission, I thought I'd try Psylocke who is one of my favorite X-Men. Despite everything they've done to her over the years, she remains a bad ass.

In terms of some of the stuff I did here, I'll run down some of the techniques I used.
Background. I made the background using Adobe Photoshop Elements /Render/Fiber with brown and black, and multiplied it a few times to make the planks of wood on the floor. I reused the same chunk of wood to fabricate the rest of the back ground. After each dimension was created, I used/ Render/lighting effects to capture how the wood would potentially reflect the light on each surface. this took for ever and a day to do. I used a reference image of a dojo doing a random search.
The ref pose was pretty nice but once I started I messed up the composition as the hands wouldn't fit the drawing, so I brought them down a little bit to make her hands grasping the katana from her back, hence the red belt over her chest.
The colors took a while but after playing with some of the tools in a new way, I've developed a technique using the burn and doge tools to give me the layers of shading that I was looking for. I like how the legs turned out, not so much on the arms as they were overshadowed principally and I had to move forward on this piece.
I tried making the psi-knife similar to what Alex Garner did with his and I failed. I'm not sure how to do anything just yet but I blur white and pink to give the knife the look, worked out okay. I'm happy with the shading of her arm and hair that reflect the light coming from the knife.

As always, comments, feedback, tips on how to improve are always welcome, especially tips for improvement.