How-to-Draw SDGundam Steps 1-2

A friend of mine was poking at me for some art tips, and I suggested to do a Tutorial on how I draw gundams to see if there's anything that might help her out. I'm going to have to do this in a group of shots, so it might take me a few days to put up all the parts to it.

So! :3c We are drawing Seishin [(c) Me] and Miichelle, characters from the FoG RPG. (Since I need some practice on Seishin's Nero design. Px )

Step 1
Of course, before we can really start drawing, we need to think of what pose we want our characters in. For this, I decided I wanted to take Seishin out of his usual confrontational pose and put him into a more defensive position. Currently, we're going to have him kneeling on the ground, hugging Miichelle close to protect her from something, with his wings spread out full.

Step 2
(We're going to do this in sections, so bare with me. It gets kind of long.)
[A] Normally I'd start at the head and work my way down, but due to how difficult it is to start out this type of pose, we're going to start with his feet and work our way up. Before I can put where his feet are, I need to figure out where the horizon line (marked) is, so we can see where the closer edge of the ground ends to see how far we can space his feet apart.

[B] Because we want to center Seishin so we can make sure his wings fit on the page, I've started by placing his knee first. Afterwards, I draw the line segment for his lower leg, which gives me the angle for his foot. Also, thigh length and lower leg length segments SHOULD be close to the same length. ( In other words, if Seishin were standing, the length of his thigh would be the same on both legs, and same for his lower legs. The same would apply to his arms.)

[C] Lets face it. Placing feet are hard, and finding the angle of the bottom of those flat feet are even harder. Just keep in mind the closer those front parallel lines are, the further the foot is turned away from the viewer (us). This should help get you through it.

[D] Okay, now here we have two things going on in this massive collection of confusing circles. First, I'm going to point out that blue circle. For SD Gundams, [at least in this universe], they have a souldrive, gunsoul, or soulstone that's usually partially visible somehow. This blue circle is the glass protecting Seishin's souldrive [or the souldrive itself]. This will help us place his chest. The next thing we have happening in this part is the largest circle somewhat behind his souldrive. This is basically the torso, which allows us to have our gundams in uncanny dodging poses, or doubled over from some jerk kicking them in the stomach [or worse, if you want to go there], or just plain standing there looking innocent. This sense of direction is helped by the vertical line (that's unfortunately been partially erased) that shows where their "spine" is; in Seishin's case, his back is curving inward to support his wings being open and to shield Miichelle in his arms.
~~~ On the triangle you see in the pic, I drew this in later before I started on his wings so that I'll be able to find the front edge of his souldrive casing in his chest later. Finding this is important, because it's how you find the angles of the rest of Seishin's chest and vents from. This "edge" will be parallel to the line that goes between his shoulders, which aren't always parallel to the horizon line.

[E] The second line perpendicular to the "spine" gives us the depth and angle of Seishin's chest, and helps us find where his head [Large circle above it] is. On the head itself, the darker, crossed lines show us which direction he's facing, and give us the line for either his optics, or the edge of his helmet above his eyes. For now, we're ignoring his V-fins, but on a simpler gundam that has a single V-fin (Like Captain's, from SDGF), we could add in the vague triangle shapes. We'll go more into detail on V-fins in a later step.

[F] Here, I started with his upper-right arm segment to try to find where his shoulder would be. The arm itself comes out (forward) more than if he would be crossing his arms, since we're going to draw in Miichelle later.
~~ As I draw in his second arm on the other side with the help of a horizontal line to get distance, I see that we're not going to get a good look at his chest in this pose from his arms alone. Due to my experience in drawing these guys, Seishin's arms might get too thick to draw Miichelle in. We might have to take her out of the picture, and move his arm to be holding his side as if he's injured instead.

[G] The orbs (in red) are the junctions for Seishin's wings. The bottom-most pair are where his wings attach into his back, while the remaining three are for his simple-frame wing design. Since it's a simple-frame, we can use the natural curve of our wrist to draw in the curved spikes of Seishin's wings. Because of the angle we're looking at him from, his right wing gets obscured from sight somewhat by the way the spikes curve, but we get a more defined look at Seishin's left wing to understand that its the curve of his wings that cause this appearance.
~~The junctions here are a good thing to note in comparison to Mack's, or Soyakaze's wings. Seishin's wingjoints are open, so they're a lot like a wrist or a foot; Mack's wing-joints are a little more limited, keeping mainly to a linear open-close fashion, like a shoulder joint. Soya's wings don't move aside from that single back-to-wing junction, but that joint on all wings are "open".

Step 3