bikiniarmorbattledamage:

Thank you to icykitty for sharing the trauma of a set of armor that may actually be worse than the infamous outfit of Shahde from Prince of Persia.

– wincenworks

I like to think that the all-around badness of

this figure

kinda makes it an unintentional piece of commentary art. As if the designer/sculptor/company behind it was trying to say “You though you saw the worst of sexy female warriors? Nope, they could look like THIS!”.

And it just gets better when you turn it around and consider the anatomy… not only is her whole shoulder clearly dislocated and torso unnaturally swiveled, the sculpt of her underboobastic top makes it look as if she had an extra breast right under her armpit!

~Ozzie

Ah, sweet memories, of when I was cruising the internet for cursed content only part-time. : )

I was actually feeling optimistic lately about the state of miniatures nowadays. All the board games I play avoided this kind of low-effort designing for their lady characters. Were board game developers finally embracing the endless possibilities that not necessitating “Tiddy Out” provided??

But then I discovered that I actually living in a bubble and that a board game RPG got kickstarted in the year of our lord 2019 with this as a promised character/mini:

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That’ll teach me to have barely-mid-tier standards! 

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-Icy

Odin’s Boob Sphere Redraws: Velvet

Not sure why it’s now apparently my brand to redesign characters named Velvet, but here we are. Can you tell that this gal is a forest witch? Cause neither can I. She’s also a princess. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I really want to see the art lead’s notes on this design, just to see what their “reasoning” was for this. “The gold jewels under her breasts are symbolic of her ties to the royal family, but she can’t see them because of her breasts obscuring them, just like she lost sight of her family!!” I don’t know.

For the redesign, I just wanted to give her some breast support (since she does acrobatics and stuff, and you don’t want to be distracted by The Jiggles), as well as some kind of pant so that she doesn’t have to worry about forest insects biting her in the crotch. This is the result of 2 iterations on both the top and the pants, in usual “me” fashion. So let’s break it down.

The red sleeves looked weird to me, so I just combined them into the black shirt. Since the belt? crotch covering? I don’t know, but since that part is also black, I just decided to make all that into the collective Shirt. On top of them is that half vest that has the hood attached. I decided to give her some jingling coins at the last minute, cause the idea of hearing her walking through the forest would be kinda eerie, and she’s apparently an expert acrobat, so they would make noise when she fights. ~It could also be seen as a remnant of her royal life,~ or something.

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As for the pants, I didn’t really have any ideas, so I just went the default “poofy pants” route, and then picked the only other color in the color scheme that wasn’t red or black. I initially was going to get rid of her butt cape, but decided to keep it cause she just didn’t look quite right without it.

I remember disliking the final result when I finished it initially, but looking at it again now, it actually looks kind of good? Maybe her shirt sleeves are a bit too short, but at least I don’t have to continuously grimace just looking at her now.

-Icy

The Masculine Beauty of Superhero Figure, Part 2

I decided to empower Daredevil, cause his premise lends itself well to wearing a skimpy outfit. After all, he’s an acrobat who cares about mobility and flexibility. He dodged all those shurikens(?) by doing all those backflips (I haven’t seen the movie since it came out, okay?)! Him doing that while fully-clothed was the most unrealistic part of that movie, honestly. Also, the rustling of the cloth against his skin would get in the way of him hearing important things. His design was really careless. :

So to improve it, I started by cutting out some key pieces of his existing bodysuit, to increase his mobility and reduce fabric noise. I also made sure that we can tell exactly how big his empowerment is. Rendering those abs was a lot of fun! (And the belt buckle says “Juicy” thanks to a viewer suggestion.)

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I also adjusted his face a bit. I got rid of his laugh lines and gave him fuller, more shaped lips. He’s supposed to be hot, Elektra kissed him and everything! And since his face is now hotter, I removed some of his mask to show it off. Mmm, that crisp jawline!

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I was going to give him a feather crown or something, but decided against it.

This one was definitely fun, especially since I never saw the TV show or read the comics, so my memory of DD came only from the unfortunate movie (you’re welcome for being reminded of it). Maybe we’ll empower Bullseye sometime too.

Hope you enjoyed!

-Icy

@vertiga submitted:

I saw this magazine in tesco and stared at it for a good minute just going ??? This is the cover image they chose for a magazine about the *essential* things for fantasy artists to learn, and doesn’t that just say it all?

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We featured this magazine on the blog before, but it never got bingo’ed! Now that’s been rectified.

This design honestly looks like when you’re drawing the figure to figure out pose and what not, and end up putting way too much detail into it that you like. And then you feel bad for having to put clothes on top of your hard work, so you just kinda… stick some liquid metal to the essential areas, add some small decorative pieces, and call it good.

“Create better characters” indeed.

But worry not, everyone, their standards for the actual in-magazine content is the same:

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She’s supposed to be a ranger.

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-Icy

More Bad Drawing Guides on BABD

Fire Emblem: Pantsening, Part 1

(The title is not a joke on Awakening, I know Nyx is not from that game.)

So, doing redesigns for the game series that keeps on giving… its lady characters no pants. I don’t even care if they’re garbage pants, can they please have something, so that they’re not riding frigging scaley wyverns with bARE LEGS-

Ahem. Anyway, Fire Emblem. I decided to redesign Nyx. I don’t know what it is with me and FE dark mage types. Mostly, what caught my eye was that this was another FE woman who looks way younger than her age, while wearing strangely revealing clothes.

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Most of the edits I did involved giving her an actual shirt, rather than…. uhh?? … as well as some PANTS. I also broke up her shoes into two parts mostly for the design aspect. Such tall thigh-highs make any non-leggings look weird. The last big change was her veil, which I tried to make a little more realistic-looking. I’m not sure how, in the original, the veil is supposed to be hanging down, but then be behind her long bangs that fall close to her face??

The dark skin-tone parts on her clothes are opaque, by the way. I was just too lazy to come up with another color for them, to be honest. This was definitely one of those streams where I was struggling to work with what I had… I probably could have done a better job given more time, but I’m fairly happy with it as it is now. I promise I’ll do a non-mage the next time we redesign Fire Emblem ladies.

-Icy

A while ago, we got a submission of an Aspen Matthews figurine where she only had 2 1/5 pieces of bone armor on. Tumblr flagged the post as adult content, so here’s a picture:

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Turns out, there’s another bone armor version of Aspen! This one has more bones, though I would still call this 2 1/5 pieces of armor collectively, since that torso piece is not a full piece of anything, besides Disappointment. 

At least she has biceps? Though they seem to be coming out of her boobs.

-Icy

PLACEHOLDER

BattleWrong – We’re sure that Joke hasn’t been done before! 

Battlerite’s a bit of a disappointment in its character design. They seem to have cool ideas (for the male characters and Iva), and their art style is cute and colorful… and yet. So why not try to fix some of their more uninspired designs?


Blossom

To be honest, my desire to redesign Blossom was from my deep-seated frustration with animal-looking characters having a humanoid body shape. Why couldn’t she just be like Puss in Boots from the Shrek movies? Just a deer that stands on her back legs, without breasts and a skinny waist and hips. I realize that she’s a “faun” according to the wiki, which means human/animal hybrid, but the fact that she has both hair and fur on her head/face makes it look like they just slapped some tits on an upright deer. Maybe they were going for something new, but boy did it not work.

I tried to give her more clothes at first, but then decided…. screw it. She’s a deer now. Why does she wear clothes? So in the end, I just gave her a simple poncho. I did want to show off her deer-ness, so I left her shoulders uncovered and gave her upper body some fur, so it’s not weird that she has the same on her face.

I also changed her face to be less Generic Cute Girl.

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After I finished the edits, we started making jokes about just Photoshopping a deer head on her instead, so I did that. Got some images of a deer and a birb off the internet, and so Blossom’s True Form came to be. (You can still see the lines from the stock image watermark.)

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[She’s beauty, she’s grace, she’ll throw an acorn at your face.]

The result is fairly simple and could probably use some embroidery or patches of different-colored cloth, and some people might say this was an easy cop-out on my part. But I just want her to be a deer, not a deer with boobs; is that too much to ask for?

-Icy


Freya 

Thing about Freya’s original design is that I don’t actually find it overall bad – the random bikini top that looks like coconut shells strapped to a choker is the only thing that ruins it.
As mentioned back when we bingo’d her pre-update design (with even worse, sideboob-y bikini top!), she looks pretty great from waist down. Also, while far from unique, her face shape is allowed to be a tiny bit more angular… when viewed from certain angles, at least. 

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(basically it’s Zarya level of safe approach to diversity in female facial features – still conveniently attractive and wears makeup, but allowed to have square-ish jawline, given that you tilt your head and squint)

But since I couldn’t spend 2 hours of stream only painting her a decent top, I decided to build upon what’s there and add some more actually distinct features.

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Of course, the boobplate had to go first. Since it bore some resemblance to Angela’s (coincidentally, also character associated with Norse mythology), I decided to base Freya’s new breastplate on my earlier Angela redesign. Also a blue tank top matching her bracer and tassets, for minimal layering. Left her shoulders bare, just gave them a tiny bit more heft. 

I approached tweaking her face to create a more believable character. No makeup (which, unfortunately made her blue eyes with orange eyebrows stand out less), more prominent freckles, bigger nose, more sunken cheeks… All to create an image of a warrior who’s more concerned with surviving battles than spending hours in front of the mirror. 

I’m rather pleased with the subtle changes to this design and my painting technique in this piece. Hope you guys like it too. 

~Ozzie 

PS: I didn’t know that while doing this redesign, but apparently some genius on Reddit, upon seeing slightly more boob coverage on Freya’s official updated design decided to “fix” her back to her original bikini. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ 

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aleph-ozone submitted (and Icy Bingo’ed):

She doesnt really wear armor, but i wanted to show this to you anyway: Final Fantasy’s embodiment of entropy, the Cloud of Darkness. She’s supposed to be a god-level creature of destruction, who for no reason looks like a human being.

For no reason indeed! Yikesaroonie. From the wiki:

Though the Cloud of Darkness universally takes on a feminine form, it is officially considered a genderless being that merely chooses to appear as such.

(And yes, the entire wiki page uses “it” to refer to this being.) I guess an almost-naked woman dressed in unexplainable blobs of coverings is scarier than just an evil cloud or something, especially when their original appearance in Final Fantasy III looked like this:

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This was the final boss, by the by. Much scare.

-Icy 

Hey, but it’s aaall okaaay, because they are a powerful genderless being who only chooses to look like a generically sexy woman in absurdly impossible “clothing”! Their appearance doesn’t have to make sense as long as they possess magic and will to be like that. 

Yup. Makes total sense to me. Don’t look at that nosebleed I’m getting from cognitive dissonance brain strain! Just accept that this is what a sentient evil cloud of entropy would look like, okay?! *passes out*

~Ozzie