Battle-Time, All Hands on Deck

Bon-Bon, come quick! The reinforcements have finally arrived!

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recently chalked up a Yamato Twilight which was inspired by a previous Shimakaze Applejack of mine and that counter-inspired me to revisit Kancolle myself. I rolled with an American battleship this time around and really tried to experiment with the perspective and composition. I even used a tilted horizon like the cool kids! The only way to get better at things we suck at is to just tackle them, amirite? Please help a brudda out and maybe fill out a critique - I gotta learn! Huge thanks to the folks that helped me out with her - she took a very long time to knock out over these last couple weeks. Still some of the most fun drawing that I've had in a little while though. ^^

She's heavily based on USS Iowa although it's not 100% accurate, of course. I actually did a little reading on Kantai Collection (Wikipedia does too count!) and it said that no one work, including the anime, is considered canon by the boys upstairs. That allows folks to get pretty creative, which I really like. I don't think I'll watch the anime because it looks like it suffers from the same issues I had with Strike Witches in that it focuses way too much on cute girls doing cute things. That's all fine and dandy, but I wanted some serious action and a compelling story, myself.

Instead we got space aliens and underage girls providing ridiculous fanservice. Strike Witches could have been sickeningly cool and badass, you know? Ah well. The girls in the Kancolle anime also look like they're five feet tall, and that ain't right. Warships are steel behemoths armed to the teeth with some of the biggest, baddest guns ever made! DiscordGE knew what was up, so I followed suit. Applejack's 45,000 tons of FREEDOM packing 16 inch LIBERTY-UNIT batteries and has come to save Lyra and Bon-Bon there from some sort of bad guys!

I'll have some more videos of the color job arriving on Youtube soon, but here is the first one for now.
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

Next up shall be the last few comms and then I can finally open up some more.
I sure hope you like her and I'll be seeing you guys!

EDIT: Added my signature (hur dur), fixed some clouds and upped the resolution.