Street Fighter Ryu is Ready! ... to"Learn To Draw With Friends"!

Hello Steemians

This is an experiment with pencil and colour pencils, my 1st entry into the "Learn To Draw With Friends" - Week 5
Contest by Hive account@tonyr, the link to the contest is shown below:

https://steemit.com/ltdwf/@tonyr/learn-to-draw-with-friends-week-five-ltdwf-45-sbd-in-prizes-to-be-won

For those who are not familiar with it:

Essentially, tonyr provides 3 pictures in the contest link (along with the image credits). There are Amazing Art works on the contest, and you can either submit one of your drawings or vote on other participants' drawings.

For the 1st entry, I have attempted the option "Streetfighter!!"
(referring to the picture shown in the link above)

I experimented with some colour pencils again and below is my attempt.

Here are some close ups of my drawing attempt:

Thought that it would be interesting to incorporate the hashtag 'ltdwf' (Learn To Draw With Friends) somewhere in the drawing

I have many progress pictures and I thought that it may make the post too long if I include all the progress pictures. Hence, I decided to create an animated gif out of a series of the progress pictures.
This decision was made after I saw the amazing animated gif created by Hive account@ckurtish in his post.
I thought that it was a great idea of showing several progress pictures and saving space at the same time.
Therefore, this "Learn to draw with friends" art contest truly lives its name as I learnt from Hive account@ckurtish to incorporate the progress pictures into an animated gif.

DRAWING PROCESS (ANIMATED)

Below are some main progress pictures, and I will include some descriptions to explain the thought process

To start off, I began a rough sketch in pencil.
There are some great drawing tutorials created by Hive account@giuatt07, Hive account@ckurtish and many others.

My preference is the "relative approach".
What this means is that I first establish what I want to have in the center of the drawing paper, by looking at the reference image.
I would then create a rough sketch, and then other parts of the drawing would be relative to it. For example, if I start with the eyes, and now I want to draw the gloves, I will ensure that the top of the gloves are around the same level as the eyes. Once the gloves are established, I have another reference point, to assist me with where the arms should be. It is a fine tuning approach and soon the drawing would start forming.

This technique requires a lot of use of the eraser as you need to fine tune it. However the benefit of it is that you will start to establish a sense of the proportions and be able to apply it faster going forward.
At the moment, it still takes me a long time to apply it, but I am willing to practice more and hopefully improve.

At this point, I am more or less done with the pencil drawing. This is where the experiment with colour pencils began....
I prefer to complete the majority of the normal pencil part first and then start using colour pencils.

I wanted to try something different with the shadows in the background.
Hope it came out okay.
And this is it:

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Thanks for your time and have a great day!