Here's what the final look is like...
I was listening to the Atari's song "Your Boyfriend Sucks" when I was trying to come up with something clever for the boy to write.
Anyway, I started out with a simple sketch. My scanner is ALL THE WAY in the other room, and I didn't feel like unplugging from the internet, so I just took a picture with my webcam on the top of my laptop. The initial sketch was drawn with him right-side-up, but for the sake of inking I wanted to make sure that the source picture would be upside-down the way it would be seen in the final picture. Sometimes if I draw characters one way with intentions of flipping them around, their proportions end up looking weird (something I need to work on) so in the meantime it's easier for me to just ink what I see.
I imported the picture into photoshop and drew over the pencil lines using my tablet. I'm still not too hot at drawing hands yet. I had to take a picture of my hand with my webcam as reference for this one...
After coloring in the blacks I used a separate layer to make the white for the skin. I made the background blue so I could make sure I wasn't coloring outside the lines. I added tattoos using premade brushes I found online. The overflow coming from the tattoos were hidden using mattes. I used two different designs for the arms and for the neck. The finger tattoos were used using a tattoo font I also found online. I had to rasterise the fonts and blur them out to make them look more like I drew them (since fonts are vectorized). After I was finished, I grouped all of the bits that made him up into a folder.
And then I forgot about taking pictures for a while, and the image up top was the final project. I did a lot of messing around with the fonts. At first I was going to paint the words in myself, and I used the wet brush effect found in the brush options to give it a shot, but it just didn't look right. Since the letters are supposedly coming from his finger, it looked kind of gruesome like it was blood (and not that I don't draw the blood and guts, but it wasn't what I was going for in this piece).
Eventually, I settled on using the typeface 'Anything You Want' for the letters instead of writing them myself. Because I'm insane and hate when I see supposedly 'hand-written' fonts that look the same if there's two of the same letter in there, I went in and replaced letters that appeared twice with a different font called 'Grunge'. That's why the Y and R in 'Your' and the first S in 'sucks' look a little different than the rest of the letters...
I went through a ton of different hearts before I decided on the one in the final picture. Once I decided on a final font, it was easier to draw it out because I wanted the heart to look the same as the font. The skull on top was actually a brush I found online (I didn't draw that), but I had to sharpen it to make it look like the rest of the words and heart (that particular batch of brushes I had downloaded look really blurry even at the base resolution, but they're cute anyway). After sharpening the skull, I added some more brushes to fill in some of the scribbles so it matched the aesthetic of the font and heart more.
Initially there was a splash of neon colors coming from behind the boy, but once I was finished with the words and stuff, I thought it didn't look right. So I messed around with mattes a little more and wondered what he would look like if instead of black lines, he had neon rainbow lines. I guess it wouldn't have looked as bad if maybe the lines were a bit darker, because it was hard to pick up some of the details like his facial features. After messing around and adding and taking away from the matte, I decided that colored tattoos looked pretty cool, and I liked the fact that what really sets this guy appart from regular men now stands out a little more. It showed how he's a really colorful guy and the type to leave this message to some girl he's probably crushing on.
So, there you have it! I hope you enjoy it ^___^!
EDIT
So, what started out as a simple correction (I had missed replacing a U in the font) I was looking at the picture and I decided that I didn't like the way the boy was position. So I got rid of his arm and drew a new one. (I turned the picture right-side-up so I could draw the hand right...) I added some finer details that I had missed while drawing him upside-down (some shadows and making lines darker and stuff). I added some ink to his new hand and some handprint paintbrushes that I got online... Finally, I touched up the skull because I realized belatedly that it had that 'Oh, wow, she totally used the sharpen tool on that' look to it.
And here's the (updated) final product!
