CG1: Eagle and Terra

Finally, I have finished the first of five Christmas gifts for my friend and roommate, Crystal. In FEBRUARY. *headdesk* This shows how busy I am. At this rate, I'll be lucky if I can finish the other four by NEXT Christmas. -_-

Anyways, this is Eagle and Terra, Crystal's fancharacter for Magic Knight Rayearth. One of the reasons she wanted this pairing was to see if I coud do the CLAMP style, and I had sooo much fun trying it. I generally try to do fanart in the style of the series, unless the style is so drastically different from my own that I want to see what it looks like in mine (like, say Danny Phantom and Kids Next Door). So I pulled up a buncha MKR pics on my computer and went to work.
Terra is a what-if kind of character. Mainly going off the idea that there are FOUR major elements, and MKR kinda left earth out of the picture (it had air, fire, and water, but no earth?). So she created a character who was the Magic Knight of Earth. And because she felt so darn sorry for Eagle, she paired them up.
Eagle's missing hand is on top of Terra's missing hand. Hiding behind her back. They're not ones to be exactly obvious.

Terra's Knight costume came from kinda getting inspiration from the other three knight costumes, plus a little of my own imagination. Dang it though, but I forgot to draw her CAPE in this pic. >_< Not like you're missing much; it'll be brown and just as swirly as the other three capes. Come to think of it, I could have used the cape to hide my lame background. Rats.
Eagle came from looking off several color manga pics I had. Didn't use any anime reference, since the anime kinda botches the art a little. However, I didn't have that many reference pics, so some small details may be off (such as the fact that I think his forearm-gadget should be bulkier).

Background was annoying as usual. I didn't really have anything planned when I drew the pic, so I decided to play with more vectors (I reeeally must hate myself), fill patterns, and sunset techniques. I started using a sunset tutorial, but ended up tossing it in the air and doing my own thing. End result is much better, I think. What REALLY annoyed me was in trying to get the vertical pattern for the stone pillar, the rendering never came out right. You can kinda see it in that block of darker patten. I was so frustraited that I just said "to heck with this", and left it as it was. Nothing I could do could fix it, and there was no real reason for it anyways. Go figure.

Actually, now that I look at it all uploaded, it kinda looks like Eagle's about to push her off. O_o