Well, I finally did a straight out fanart for Naruto (Genma doesn't really count, that was for a fanfic).

Sakura Haruno.

What to say... amazingly I didn't work on this all that long. The hardest part was the size of my reference image that I based the pose on. Plus I wanted to work a bit larger for once. The hair is so streaky and meh! It's like I'd forgotten how to paint hair or something, but short of completely scrapping it and starting over, I just kept working on what I had. Yeah, I'm just not happy with it, but not sure how to fix at this point.

I tried something completely different for the skin shading, going with a straight out different color instead of shades and tones of the skin color, and I think it turned out pretty well. It was a bit of an experiment that turned out all right and the green works well with her pink hair.

Download for the full size 2048x1536.

Sakura Haruno, Naruto (c) Kishimoto Masashi
Everything (c) me

Photoshop 7.0, Wacom tablet
Time ~ 5-6 hours.
Reference photo used from the lovely gals of Pepstock [link]

EDIT 8/6/2008 - I uploaded a slightly corrected version of this image today. The biggest change was giving her eyebrows, which I somehow completely forgot to do the first time around. I also added some teeth on suggestion and tried to soften her jawline somewhat, since I was getting reviews that she was too masculine looking. Oh, and highlights to the skin.

EDIT 6/27/2009 - I've done an updated version of this piece which can be found here => [link]