FMA Poster WIP

Hi :)

I am working on a poster for my boyfriend's birthday. FMA is his favorite anime, and I have only JUST started watching it (up to ep 12).

I am doing a preliminary photoshop pic, and then I am basically going to duplicate it in Illustrator after so the poster can be resizeable to any size and still be crisp (im turning it into a vector drawing).

So I have already started some of the work, so I will upload a few of the WIPs. The first pic is my sketch on the right and the references i used on the left.

What I am wondering is what composition do you guys prefer?

Just ed, ed with al, or ed with al and the alchemy circle off center?

I seem to prefer just ed, but it feels empty :(.

Update! I decided to put winry in there too, looking like a damsel in distress :)

looks great, nice work.

it's good work, but I don't think it's as good with Winry in there... the rest of the image is crisp and sharp, but she's somewhat blurred and just... I can't even see her eyes! And her bandana isn't clean either... I just don't think it makes a good contrast with everything else... The Al looks pretty good though.

Finally, one small detail, the last letter at the bottom, the T in Alchemist, it just looks terrible with the little sparkle on it. There's a strange black outline behind the top of the letter that just also looks wrong. Try making the 'sparkle' effect more prevelent on it, because right now it looks just a little too smudged over.

All in all it's very good stuff

Thanks for the crits :) Though the line quality was temporary because it was just a preliminary sketch before the vectoring.

I've started vectoring now and here is what I have so far. The image is made to be 24" x 36" so its quite big. As you can see I changed ed's face... and sparing you guys the other versions, let me say I went through A LOT to get the likeness this accurate >.< (if you guys still see anything let me know because its easily fixable).

I also attached a 100% size version so you can see what size it will be on the wall... Depending on your comp resolution i guess it will be a little bigger or smaller looking. But you can look at all the nice pretty vector lines and see why I wanted to do it in Illustrator and not in photoshop.

Edit: Also since you guys didn't get to see how much I had to change the face and how many times I did it... I made a little progress jpg. I improved ed every time I watched a new episode of FMA, and im up to ep 34 now... who know actually watching the anime would help? lol... ;)

it's damn good. once you finish Ed's chest and Winry it'll be very impressive. lucky person, whoever is getting this gift