eDIT:

OKAY. I GUESS I SHOULD MAKE THIS CLEAR HERE. DO NOT COLOR OR EVEN ATTEMPT TO COLOR THIS. I WANT THIS TO BE BLACK AND WHITE, SO PLEASE RESPECT THE WISH OF THE PERSON WHO SPENT SIX DAYS DRAWING THIS. the reason why this would look bad in color is because there are too many lineshadings involved, and hence color does NOT go well with this.

if you see this being posted anywhere in color, please let me know -____-;

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if you're not caught up with the manga and this spoils you, i apologize.

this is not an aesthetically pleasing wallpaper, but if you wanna use it as wallpaper:
1280x1024: [link]
1024x768: [link]


this will be a long comment, but it gives you an insight on how i work, so if you are interested in that, read on. if you don't give a ratatouille's ass, then feel free to skip

first off, happy 10th anniversary, one piece. congratulations, oda-sensei, for making it this far. i truly enjoy reading OP and i hope it will have another 10 years of success.

now, some people have wondered what kind of thing would come out if and i collaborate on a piece. well, this is it. our very first collaboration. eggy had the idea of a thriller bark diner with 3 or 4 of the mugiwara being served by cindry, perona, and hogback. i like this idea and told him that we should make this a real spread before anime expo so we can sell it. however, when eggy was over at my place, he had a few postcards to finish and i had the skypiea postcards to finish too. so by the time those were done, i was too burnt out to make a huge piece, and thus we did not get any farther than planning out the layout of the diner and what character goes where and does what.

here is what eggy and i planned out on my sketchbook: [link]

as you can see, it's really sketchy and it's not exactly what the spread came out to be, but it gives a nice rough idea of who's gonna be doing what and interacting with who.

so after eggy went back to canada, one piece's 10th anniversary came around and i felt obliged to draw something as a tribute. something more than just a little "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY OP" thing. and what easier to draw than something that's already planned out? and so i started drawing this last tuesday night. it would've been so much better had eggy been here to help out with drawing the girls, but you gotta work with what you've got.

now, this is not intended to be a tutorial (who am i to give one, i've never taken an art class in my life), but i'd like to share my thought process while making this. take in what you think is useful for you, and ignore what you think is useless.

this piece was decided to be a 2-point perspective piece with the setting of an american diner. so the first thing to do is to decide where the horizon line and the 2 points would be. turned out the perspective points are located outside the page. so i attached some scrap paper behind the bristol pad and attached a string to the points so i can use the string to draw the perspective lines. [link] . if you have a meter stick, that would work as well. i'm just cheap. don't forget to make sure the string is tout when you use it to draw a perspective line. this was what i had monday night (or tuesday morning) around 1am.

tuesday evening, i started putting in characters. this is how the kitchen counter looks like that evening around 6pm while i was working: [link]

when drawing in the characters, even if they're behind an object, i have the habit of drawing the whole body. this way i can see if there's something wrong with the perspective or proportion. for example, in this picture [link] , robin's ass is way too big. so that needed fixing. from that picture also, you can tell that the dining table is rather low, because from simulating how she sits, you can see that her thigh/knee joint presses against the table's edge, and that's not how a dining table is designed (unless you want an uncomfortable one). there are a few solutions to this:

1. make robin's body smaller (bad, because then it would seem like she's sitting in a huuuuge booth, while diner booths are generally small
2. raise the level of the table, or lower the level of the seat (i chose to lower the seat because raising the table is a lot of work and i'm lazy)

here i started drawing in luffy cindry and usopp [link]

notice that cindry's pose here is different from what came out in the actual piece. eggy mentioned that cindry looks like she's looking at the plates instead of usopp, who she's throwing plates at, so i redid her head and made her look forward instead of down. notice also that the leg position is different. even when i have the whole sketch planned out, i like to experiment with different positions to see which pose comes out best on the actual board. i don't know if it's just my incapability, but i can never produced two identical drawings, so sketching on the board is like re-planning. here's cindry with a different leg position. [link]

i had some problem following the original sketch that eggy and i planned out. in the original plan, franky's toasting with bearsy with his LEFT hand. i thought toasting with someone on your RIGHT with your LEFT hand is really uncomfortable, so i changed it into toasting with RIGHT hand. this became a problem because franky's arm is HUGE and it takes up space. because of this, bearsy had to be pushed a to the left of the picture, and leaving only a small space for perona. in the sketch, perona is right next to bearsy while hogback is at the far left of the picture. because of this modification i had to reposition hogback. so instead of putting perona right next to bearsy, i moved her to the far left of the picture and put hogback in between the two, BEHIND THE KITCHEN WINDOW. [link]

as you can see, having the sketch planned out beforehand does not mean things will go smoothly. i still had to reposition some things. that last picture was how much i had on the board when i stopped drawing and went to bed tuesday night around 2am (or i guess that would be wednesday morning).

notice also that sanji's holding a single rose here. i realized that drawing someone holding a single rose is really hard and i could not get it right. so i abandoned the idea. i also played around with the idea of putting absalom next to sanji holding another rose while sanji's kicking his face, but i could not execute that very well, and so i abandoned the idea. i get a lot of ideas after i started drawing, but sometimes i can't get them on paper the way i had them pictured in my head, so i tend to abandon these ideas and try to come up with different ones. i think it is better to revise your idea than to have it carried out in an unsatisfying manner.

when i was working on wednesday, i abandoned the idea of sanji holding a single rose and instead gave him A DOZEN ROSES. this is what i had wednesday evening around 8pm: [link]

then i proceeded to add in a few more characters, like the squirells and dogpen. this is how the kitchen counter looked when i was working. [link] notice i was also chatting on aim, which was quite a distraction.

wednesday night i decided to start draft inking the piece. i call it "draft inking" because when you ink straight on the paper you did your pencil sketch on, when you erase the pencil, the ink will fade away and you'll have to reink again. so i picked my worst-shaped micron (almost dead 005) and started inking the whole thing really fast. at this point i don't really care about precision because the ink will fade away after erasing and any mistake i made during draft inking can easily be fixed when reinking or when applying highlights. this is what i had wednesday night (thursday morning) before i went to bed: [link] i also decided to change cindry's arm position because after looking at the manga, i noticed that when she throws plates, she fully extends her arms. i'm a detail fetishist, so i like to make sure that little things are consistent with the original. these are not my characters, so i think it is common courtesy to stick with how the mangaka designed them to be.

i spent all thursday evening draft inking and finished thursday night (friday morning) around 2am. this is how it looked like before i went to bed [link] notice i decided to change cindry's legs position again. i like to simulate what's going on as i draw to make sure they come out as naturally as possible. i believe that your own body is your best reference because 1) you don't have to pay money to see yourself naked and 2) you can make yourself do whatever embarrassing pose you want. so i tried simulating plates throwing and realized that it's easier to throw plates with my legs spread out. this is perfect because it gives space for brook's head between her legs. eggy came up with this idea of brook under the table peeking up cindry's skirt, and i thought it was brilliant.

i made a mistake on zoro's sword: [link] sandai kitetsu (the reddish sword) is supposed to have 8 cross-wraps on its hilt, not 6. but i inked this thinking it was 6 and there was no other way to fix it after inking, so i gave up on it and call it another imperfect piece because i was careless.

friday evening i started final-inking and filling in the blacks. i used OP vol 46 as a reference of details that oda put in the clothes design. for example, the detail of the lace on robin's dress: [link] and perona's outfit: [link]

i also took some pictures while i was inking dogpen:
[link]
[link]

i worked nonstop friday and finished the inking of most of the main characters. i also finished putting in the checkerboard pattern on the counter, which is a typical american diner tile pattern.
[link]
[link]
some quick imagegoogle search on "diner floor", "diner tile pattern", and "diner counter" gave nice quick references. if you ever need a quick reference, [link] is your best friend. be careful when imagegoogling certain things, though. i had to filter through some porn while looking up references for cindry's maid costume.

the bad thing about working for a couple of days nonstop is that you get burned out. i slacked off the entire day saturday and even seriously considering giving up. i went out and ate some good food and saturday night i was good to go again. i started kinda late, around 11pm that saturday, and by sunday morning around 5am, i had completed all the main characters, as well as the floor and the design on the diner booths. [link] looking for a reference for the sentence on usopp's banner thingy was a real bitch. i looked through every single chapter and none had a good clean view on the 2nd and 4th character. curses.

sunday i spent the whole day thinking what i should do to fill in the wall behind franky and i came up with the idea of paintings/portraits. so i used this chance to include three other characterS: moria [link] , gigolo of the wind [link] , and cerberus [link] . too bad cerberus' fox head is blocked by the plate. that fox was certainly amusing. these drawings are by far the HIGHLIGHT of making this big spread. they're less than 2x2 in size, but i had so much fun including scribbly details in them, like moria's hall and pile of skeletons and bones underneath cerberus.

and yes, those were the teaser i submitted sunday night. xD

this is the last picture i have: [link] . this was how the spread looks like monday morning around 4am after i finished everything and applied some white ink for character outline. the only thing left to do at this point is to fill in the menu board and the kitchen behind hogback. i did this monday afternoon, and almost lost a week's worth of work when my phone rang and made me tip over the white ink bottle. good thing i have the reflexes of a mongoose and i grabbed the board before ink got on it.

all in all, it's been a good, productive week.
by far the best thing i have produced so far. this is actually a drawing that made me feel proud finishing it. there are still some mistakes and things i'm unhappy about, like how the word "ONE PIECE" and the caption should've been moved over a bit more towards the right and that the background behind absalom could use more work, but i'll not dwell on that. i looked back at my old drawings from 2004 and noticed how much i've improved over the course of 3 years. practice makes perfect? not really, but practice certainly gets you better, bit by bit.


happy 10th anniversary once again, one piece. and thank you, oda-sensei; if it weren't for your manga, i would not have picked up pencil and paper again back in 2003. much thanks to those who bothered reading through this rant. the next piece will be better, i promise.

p.s. is awesome. the dogpen here is for her.