You've all heard of MS Girls, right? You know, the fan-made drawings that put busty, non-descript anime girls in mobile suit armor? Well, thanks in part to some of my friends and me, they now have a counterpart: MS Guys. But we're doing something a little different. Instead of using non-descript anime-styled people as our subjects, we've decided to take the next step and use the actual MS pilots instead! After all, the majority of the Gundam characters out there who are pilots are mostly males, so why not?

Anyway, you can obviously see who I've chosen as my victi--er, subject here. :P As soon as I learned that a friend of mine was trying to get the MS Guy phenomenon started, the wheels in my head started turning, and the idea for this was born. It's probably one of the strangest and most surreal drawings I've done in the last few years, but I had fun with it. Originally when I was sketching this out, I was intending to show Jamil without the sunglasses (for reasons that should be obvious if you've seen enough of my artwork already . . . ^_~), but because of the size of the drawing on 11"x14" paper, they just didn't look right, so I drew on the sunglasses after all. I think it's better that I did do that, seeing as how trying to CG the eyes would've been a pain in the rear anyway. >_< I also made the Gundam armor itself look a little more streamlined in some places to give it the appearance of body armor instead (so yes, I intentionally left out the breast vulcans for anyone who was wondering); another of the concepts behind MS Guys is that we want to make them look more like knights in shining armor instead of just taking the person's near-bare body and slapping pieces of the MS onto it (as is the case with many of those scantily-clad MS Girls). But either way, because I'm still not all that great with drawing mecha, this proved to be a bit of a challenge nonetheless (and you can probably tell that I did a horrible job in trying to draw the beam machine gun, and part of his lower right leg looks kinda odd -_-;).

As for actually working on this, I had run into so many problems when trying to CG this. Just shortly after I'd started doing the shading, my laptop crashed, and the original file got stranded on it. As a result, I had to completely re-scan the original lineart on my mom's old PC (as my scanner wouldn't work with my new one >_<), transfer it to the new PC, and start all over. Then, at one point I'd spent several hours one night working on the pic without saving, and all of a sudden Photo-Paint crashed on me, and I lost everything I'd done in several hours and had to start over from where I'd left off before that night. *sigh* Thankfully I remembered much of what I wanted to do, and that's what you see here . . . thus the reason it took from the end of October to mid-December to finish this thing. The larger image you see in the background is a result of combining all the layers of the working image together into one, copying and pasting it, converting it to grayscale, cropping off a part of it, doing a vignette effect, enlarging it, and then altering the transparency to what you see here . . . a concept I picked up from a completely different drawing a friend did (thanks for telling us how you did it, Straya!). I'd been strapped for ideas with the background until some friends suggested this type of color scheme (which I think looks really nice against the Divider's colors), but the "GX-9900-DV" (which is of course the Divider's model number) was something I'd wanted in there all the long, as it reminded me of how some people would do their MS Girl pictures. This is also the first CG-ed picture I've finished since doing "Youthful Splendor" WAY back in January, so I'm quite proud of myself for that, especially considering that, unlike that or my CG-ed Double X picture, I had to do all the shading on this with a regular mouse. (What I wouldn't give for one of those Wacom tablets . . .)

Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the final outcome of this picture. It's a bit of a departure from my regular drawings, so I think that's what made this so much fun despite the many hassles. But will I ever do any other MS Guys related to GX? Perhaps, if I get an idea for one. But should MS Guys really catch on after this, I'm proud to say that I was one of the people who helped get it started! ^_^