Subject taken from CGTalk Daily Sketch 736 -- was of course out of time limits, though.

... So don't blame me entirely. This had better be viewed with a good dose of humour!
But really, it was lots of fun. First off, the topic struck my two-year old crush on all things Japanese (by all means mock me as you please). Then my love for all things warlike.

On a more serious note, working on fabrics is something I have been paying more attention to these days, and I think I am seeing relative improvement. On the same technical level, I wanted to work a little on my contrast with pencils. I used a calligraphy pen for the black areas and a small 0.25 pen for the deepest shadows of the face and hair -- the rest is done with a 3B and an HB mechanical pencil for some details.

Known issues: The blade, which is barely big enough for a wakizashi, let alone a katana. For some silly reason -- but mainly because I had started this as a practice peace rather than a drawing to be finished and polished up -- I thought it better to make it smaller rather than cut it at the edge of the paper. The hand also annoys me -- it's far from correct. And the foot and geta are problematic, too. (And then there are all sorts of smaller things in the clothes' folds that the perfectionist me cringes at but cannot really do much about since it's a pencil, not a digital drawing.)
After some thought, I decided to leave the right part of the doorway sketchy. I am not sure the transition from rendered to sketchy is as smooth as I'd have liked it, though.

Anyway. I'm one-third-happy with this. I am seriously tempted to remake it.