So~... uh... This could be either Light in a sort-of realistic style, or Gackt that has received a Death Note for birthday (which is a pretty disturbing thought, I don't know why XD)
In either cases, the title is appropriate XDD

I actually started it as a Gackt portrait, but it wasn't coming as I wanted and I decided to turn it into a realistic Death Note fanart XD But then, I was getting crazy about the face not coming out right, and I took the photo of Gackt I was referencing and overlapped it to see what was wrong... a whole load of crap XD Stuff that happens when you learn to draw with manga and comics instead of realistic drawing, lol. The bad thing is that, despite it looked all wrong, I couldn't spot the exact mistakes at all before doing this... @_@ my eyes still need much more training...
So, after doing this I did redraw the eyes and the mouth, like, 10000 times until they finally had a decent dimension and went into an acceptable position XD The nose was right at first try though, yay!
At that point, it started to look like Gackt again, but I was already set up about making it a DN fanart and so I went straight with that XD The hand has been done without ref, and that upper finger sucks XD

I actually made the picture a few weeks ago and used it as vote incentive in my website... In comparison to that version, here Ryuk has been improved some bit (since I had drawn it by memory and it wasn't really correct ^^ Well, I bet there's something wrong here too, anyway XD)
I was procrastinating about fixing Ryuk, but today I remembered it's my favorite model's birthday, and I thought I just *had* to post it today XD
Gacktさん〜 お誕生日おめでとうございます〜！
Although I made him the evil guy XD ahah (well, sorta...)
And in Japan it's past midnight already, but, oh, well, who cares

This monster (the picture, not Ryuk) has about 20 layers and at a certain point I had to close open apps in background or the system wasn't able to fork the gz process to save the file compressed due to lack of RAM XD (I always save file compressed as xcf.gz to save space ^^, Gimp supports this kind of on-the-fly compression---- even compressed, it's almost 15 MB lol)

Each time I look at this picture I'm like "Oh my, I made this? For real?" XDDD
It has been an awesome learning experience.


Time taken - Too much to count
Painted in The Gimp from scratch

[edit 2008-10-01] I did a few changes in the shading to remove the "fatty" look that his face had ^^ I think it's a bit better now ^^

Light Yagami & Ryuk/Death Note © Tsugumi Ohba/Takeshi Obata
Thanks to Gackt for existing and for unknowingly serving as my model XD