Horton Hearts A Holiday Card

This was my submission for the BSS contest.

Luchador Marty Reisman

In response to Brendan's BSS Challenge post:

After his humbling defeat at the hands of the Ping-Ponginator, Marty Reisman turned his pain into rage and decided to enter the Octagon. After a few years of training, pumping up and kicking ass, just being the world champ wasn't enough. He decided to take up his life long dream, chainsaw juggling! That is, until that fateful day.......

The Ping-Ponginator!

The second part of this week's (or month's) BSS challenge, Luchadores vs. Ping Pong Masters. Here you have her, The Ping-Ponginator!
This time I actually went old school style again and started out with a pencil. Then I went over that with a brush marker, then into GIMP for a little color. Needs some work, but once I had committed and put the marker to the page that was all she wrote, no undo's for me. But it came out all right.

Pencil drawing:

And the final image:

Mexican Wrestler

So the BSS challenge finally got going again, I pulled this out in a fairly short amount of time. I've had some people ask me about my techniques and to be honest it's not by choice. It ends up that way as I'm using GIMP and without pressure sensitivity and almost exclusivly using either the soft edge or hard edge round brush heads I've got to do some weird things to make it work. But I've been doing it so long this way that now when I go back to Photoshop I'm lost and long for GIMP. And all lens flares and cheesy lighting effects are on purpose and yes, I know I shouldn't use them. It's my rebellion against my old art professor.
Anyway, the translation under the pic is "Oh Esmeralda, I must do this for you."

"Ay Esmeralda, lo hago para ti." - Goosaba