Tag: redraw

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Soul Calibur – please put some clothes on!

This was our first attempt at fixing some of the most egregious excuses for costumes we could find in Soul Calibur games. Both those heroines would return to our streams on other occasions (including a special, already released post).

Ivy

My mortal enemy, Ivy Valentine’s declining standard in outfits. Ugh. I chose her because I love to play her when I do get to play SC (not often these days), and because she’s supposed to be a Machiavellian Immortal Super Villain (sort of), and boy, do none of the lingerie designs communicate any of this.

So anyway.

I picked this concept art from SC5 cause at least it’s redeemable. I always liked her more suit-like designs, because that shows off her personality better, I think. So I went with that and gave her a functional, high-class (cause her fam’s rich) kind of suit. Due to a personal preference for 3-piece suits, I gave her a vest to go with it. I mean, she’s still hot as hell.

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I gave her pants, obviously, and of course, actual shoes with thick, sturdy riding heels. My last addition was this thigh sword sheath thing, because I didn’t want to break the lines on her waist and hips with a belt, but it might have been better to give her a belt sheath that hangs in the back. Like this:

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It’s not as silly and I could hide the belts under her suit or something. I also wanted to incorporate the snake motif more, so I did a derpy sketchy one on her knee there.

Oh, and the face!

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I hope Cassandra is proud.

-Icy

Tira

Tira’s aesthetic not only is “poor man’s Harley Quinn”, it’s also clothes so incredibly tattered, there’s no way they’d stay up under any circumstances. 

I wasn’t particularly inspired during that streaming session, so I concluded that as long as her clothes look wearable, it counts as improvement. 

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Can’t say I’m all that proud of overall design, especially the cut of her blouse and pants, but they came out of desperation to save her from chilly winds and to layer the tights and undershirt I gave her. I guess it’s supposed to be a vaguely clown-like outfit without resembling Harley’s. Got the pink for the tights from her eye color and super faded pink-ish highlights in her hair…

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…speaking of which, since her weird pigtails looked detached from the rest of the hairstyle, I got rid of them altogether and left her with a bob. Then recolored (and added some more) highlights matching her overall color scheme. 

While the clothes I gave her are a big meh, I’m quite proud of the changes to her face, expression and makeup. Tira is supposed to be super unstable, so a runny mascara matches her personality much better and gives her more intense gaze.
Also two-colored lipstick, to compliment the highlights. And I gave her much bigger mouth with more wicked smile, a bulbous nose and a unique jawline – now you can recognize this lady by her facial features, not just color scheme. You’re welcome.

~Ozzie

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Uprooting the Sexy Flower Warriors

[We’re not sure how a draft gets posted without our permission, but Tumblr might as well start collapsing from all sides at this point. Here’s the actual full post!]

This stream we decided to devote to Flower Knight Girl, another game that, much like Kanpani Girls, seems to be an endless depository of really generic moe warrior girls in creepily skimpy “armors”. With the added gimmick of each character being flower plant-themed.

Fritillaria/Chocolate Lily/Chessboard Lily (Evolved) 

This dominatrix-looking lady apparently “evolved” by exchanging a short dress and no pants for short pants and two ribbons. Her previous form, for comparison: 

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Looking for inspiration, I just googled “fritillaria” and I learned that in Polish we call this kind of lily a “chessboard flower”, for pretty obvious reasons, once you look at its petals: 

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I decided that though this character seems based different species, fritillaria camschatcensis (there was no info on her being “chocolate lily” back then), fritillaria meleagris is much more striking visually, so I included its colors and chessboard pattern in my redesign. She doesn’t resemble her actual flower in the first place anyway. 

While the costume is amazingly skimpy and objectifying (especially that excuse for a “bra”), it’s not without a potential. There’s promising metal cincher, which I decided to enlarge and turn into full breastplate, and she comes with POOFY PANTS, a staple of BABD redesign streams, which I adorned with tassets that compliment their shape and match the breastplate. 

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I got rid

of her long-ass pigtails and of all the action lines, which collectively made the composition more chaotic than dynamic. Minor thing that bothered me was her sword being stuck in the ground for some reason instead of fastened to her belt, so I quickly fixed that too. The final touch were, of course, sleeves and tights with purple chessboard pattern, which tie the whole thing together.

I found the abundance of fleur-de-lis symbols on her to be hilariously excessive, to the point I erased all of them during the stream. After some deliberation I figured that maybe the one on her hat fits, so I just muted its color, because magenta doesn’t fit the new scheme I gave her. 

All in all, I find Fritillaria to be one of my most inspired redesigns, which makes me doubly disappointed in her creators, considering they could have just googled a flower photo to get some non-boring ideas. 

~Ozzie 

Maple

Love how she’s apparently Maple by the fact that she has some maple leaf hair clips and a bit of a maple leaf pattern on one small part of her mini skirt. So for this one, I channeled my inner Blizzard character artist, in that I wanted to way overdo the whole maple leaf theme. (I used samurai armor as reference.)

I ended up redoing almost her entire torso, since I needed to give her an actual breastplate, instead of… I guess it’s a crop top camisole? (Do those exist?) Then I gave her actual kusazuri (the plates hanging down her legs), and made them maple leaf shaped!

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I did give her a less traditional chest piece, but there are so many small shapes in the design that we needed the main armor pieces to be bigger, I think. I did break it up with a huge maple leaf on it though. 

I also hated everything about her face and hair, so I gave her a more traditional hairstyle to match her more determined expression. There were also a lot of smaller edits, like flipping her foot around so she’s not standing as awkwardly, and adding some volume and muscle to her sword arm.

And finally, I added a few more small maple leafs to her “skirt,” to really reinforce that maple leaf theme. I’d hate for people to miss it. Though, honestly, after finishing this redesign, I think she should just wear a maple leaf costume.

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-Icy 

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DC Supervillain Girls 

This stream session was devoted to antagonistic women of DC universe. They might be fiends to superheroes, but mostly to wearable fashion. 

Star Sapphire 

I knew that at some point we’ll discuss the amazingly awful modern costume of Star Sapphire (not to be confused with Starfire, also a DC property), so around the same time we redesigned and bingo’d two equally skimpy takes on the same character. 

Managed to find this official concept art for Infinite Crisis game on the artist’s dA account (please do not bully them for doing a commission of a character who already looked sexualized) that looked like a good material to work of off – digital painting that represents quite fairly how she tends to look in the comics.

There were so very little things worth preserving in the original, so I ended up redoing it almost from scratch.
First I readjusted her cartoonishly thin figure, made her olive skin a little less ambiguously brown and gave her a bigger nose – she’s more often an antihero than a villain since Star Sapphires got retconned into a Lantern corp, so I don’t think she needs to be white-passing. Also changed her haircut to a less bothersome bob. 

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Leaving in her white popped collar, I decided to use white detailing to break up purple shapes on her. Little cape with big white trim and lining is probably my favorite original part. When I was done, we concluded that it’s probably still a bit too purple, so I ended up making an alternate version, with dark violet for sleeves and pants, to have the color scheme contrast better.

Completely coincidentally we’re posting this redesign, which turned out a lot like a Ms. Claus outfit, around the Winter Holiday season. But I’ll take Santa Sapphire over Skin Sapphire any day of any season. 

~Ozzie 

Blackfire 

This was another one of those images where everything in it was just Bad. (See Valkyrie redesign for the first of these that I worked on.) So, I ended up fixing Starfire’s body too. That’s actually what I started with, because it kept distracting me how she’s doing a T&A pose while being choked. Not sure what the thought behind that was….

After that, I had to redline Blackfire to fix her back and legs, and I got to fixing her… “clothes.” I decided to go with the spikes motif and extend it into a vest. I left some of her abs showing because she’s kind of a cocky lady, and I feel like she’d want to show off a bit. I just think that she’d show off while wearing reasonable clothes.

Her face is one of my all-time favorite edits of mine. I also gave her hair red roots because I think that siblings should share at least a small piece of a design element, like I did with Morgana.

This was definitely a fun redesign. People who were there for the streams may remember that I wanted to make Blackfire trans, but I decided to back down on that, since she is a villain, and I didn’t want that association. We don’t have enough of a track record of non-evil trans ladies here, but there will definitely be more of an effort to change that.

-Icy 

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Heroes of Newerth – SEXYFIED EDITION! (NSFW)

We redesigned female Heroes of Newerth characters so many times at this point that we figured it’s the gentlemens’ turn! 

Warlock dude and Tentacle-kun 

Previously compared to his female counterpart’s bingo here

I decided I wanted to make a monster-y guy Hot, cause that’s what the people want, so I chose this nameless tentacle-y spellcaster(?) dude. He already wasn’t wearing a shirt, so I expanded upon that by shortening his veil and giving him some rocking abs. I left the ribs despite the muscles because who needs to know how anatomy works when they’re drawing Sexy Things?

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I gave him 4 male-presenting nipples, since he is a Monster Boi, as well as a smoother face with a bit of a blush. I also made all of his pointy tentacles rounded, so that he doesn’t have to worry about scratching people when he’s hugging them. 

And, of course, I gave him a visible dick that’s only covered by one of his belt chains. No close-ups of that for this post.

Finally, I made his other one-eyed monster, nicknamed Tentacle-kun on the stream, cuter and innocent-looking. After all, this is now a friendly duo of warlock and tentacle.

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-Icy 

Judge NON-Dredd 

If anyone forgot, casual reminder that HoN’s concept art gallery is a cesspool of plagiarism. How they haven’t yet been stricken with cease and desist requests by multiple IP owners is a mystery to me. 

Case in point, this character is so overtly ripped off from Judge Dredd that they couldn’t be arsed to even change his helmet’s visor design – only added a tacky fin-shaped piece on top. 

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My fixed version got his dreadful (no regrets ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)) expression replaced by a friendly smile. His lips are also now much bigger, softer and made-up with red lipstick, so that the smile reads clearly on such a small head in the scale of the whole image.
Also because he’s just secure in his masculinity – I mean, look how he flaunts his body!

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NON-Dredd’s original clothes were already borderline bodypaint thin, so it only took repainting them in his skin tone and adding the male-presenting nipples to make him truly empowered. Also, he’s not shy about his junk, therefore no more loincloth – you can see the crotch in all its undetailed glory. 

For an added touch, his shoes gained some high heels and the weird smoke coming off his left pauldron is now hot pink – again communicating that he doesn’t need to drown in shades of blue to remember his gender. 

One thing I regret is that I haven’t used the giant book chained to his waist to recreate Magilou’s book skirt! That would have been a great throwback to my first stream redesign. 

~Ozzie 

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Riders of Icarus Switch 

Another victims recipients of our switch treatment, after Saint Seiya Online, were costumes from Riders of Icarus. 

Guardian 

The change was a pretty simple copypaste job, I only adjusted details to better fit other gender’s figure. The lady’s weird incomplete underwear became full pants, the dude’s chin got exposed, so I gave him some lip gloss and goatee to flaunt it more. 

As for most crucial difference, the exposed belly and cleavage – in the original the skin looks jarringly different from the armor, as if literally rendered with different engine settings. I decided to preserve the plastic-y look of the flesh to accentuate the guardian’s masculine body. Which, BTW, probably features my best painted abs so far.

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~Ozzie 

Wizard

This one, too, was basically a copypaste job, except that I hated the shiny pants texture, so I drew them in real quick. I also changed both of their hair to not look like Absolute Garbage. The weird… leotard? lingerie? cloth coverings do end up covering basically all of the fun parts of the dude’s torso, and unfortunately, I didn’t give him my patented Semi-Translucent Bulge™. Especially with that sharp ornament pointing right at his crotch. Believe me when I say, I will not make the same mistake in future streams. At least I made sure his coattails didn’t cover his ass.

Overall, it was a fun and laid-back redesign, I think.

-Icy

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A Noble Guild Wars 2 Redesign

In the same week that Ozzie redrew the GW2 Halloween outfit, Icy decided to take out one of her pet peeves by redrawing one of the Noble outfits from the game.

I just want more ladies in suits; why is that so hard? Besides that, when I saw this dress and noticed that she’s, like, 13 heads tall, I just had to fix it. I started by redlining the original to figure out how tall she was actually supposed to be.

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[Informercial Voice: “Look at the difference!!]

After that, what I ended up doing was basically copy the dapper noble man outfit.

It was a pretty simple redesign, besides having to figure out how to get that frigging vest to look good. I also fixed her hair just a bit.

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Even though I wasn’t designing the new outfit, it was still fun to work on this, and I think it looks good. I get that GW2 is another semi-industrial fantasy world (but with a race of robot-builder scientists… sure), but that dress was just hideous, in my opinion. Anyway, enjoy a lady in a suit.

-Icy

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A Quick Return to Heroes of Newerth 

While Icy was working on her list of WIPs (some judgment, mostly from Icy herself), Ozzie trekked beyond the usual Heroes of Newerth gallery and found some officially posted concepts on Art Station. And they were all great, right? …. Right?

Looking at this set of character concepts I noticed certain… discrepancy between male and female-coded ones. It seems that the designs are pretty nice and geometrical, and work pretty well overall. Until a woman is being designed, where the priorities seemed to be cleavage and leg over a cohesive overall look.

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I believe it was one of the technical difficulty/limited time streams (also the pics were relatively low-res), so I opted to do very simple, minimal changes – just by covering up this pink/teal Grim Reaper-y (?) lady’s bare skin and giving her wearable shoes. 

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Bonus for no more “eye” designs on her boobs. I kinda like the skirt I gave her. Not much to say beyond that.

~Ozzie 

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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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Empowered Gentlemen of Paladins

Being an Overwatch clone made by the same studio as SMITE, Paladins of course lacks in the department of male empowerment. So we decided to fix that.

Lex the Silver Fox

Not unlike with Arhian, I decided to change character with platinum blonde/near white hair into an older person who grew into this silvery shade. Also Lex happens to remind me a lot of my OC who is an older, handsome gentleman, so I gave him similar facial hair. 

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As with many other my sexy male redesigns, like Poseidon, Loki or male Witch, I decided to reduce the amount of skin covering without changing the silhouette significantly.
I concluded that the little capes on his arms and sides should stay, as the shapes that most define his costume. I also left most of his belts, but had to repaint them a different shade, as they turned out to blend with his skin tone too much. 

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I’ve spent some extra time and attention on detailing the

thigh muscles, abs and crotch bulge. Also a happy trail linking the latter two.

~Ozzie

Jenos the Tease

We ended up both doing white-haired characters for the stream, but I decided to make mine more shy, by empowered man standards. The biggest edits were to his chest and upper thighs. I removed his shirt and opened up his coat to show off his Hot Bod, but still leaving a bit covered up for that ~mystery~ element. I gave him cutouts around his crotch to show off some leg as well.

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Then there were a lot of small changes: A bit of body hair on the legs and torso, longer hair in the front to further frame that collarbone, and blushing cheeks. His face was actually not made of ugly rocks covered by skin, so I didn’t have to change it!

I’m still not sure about the tall underwear, and I could have definitely shown off more of his legs, but this is a more covered-up empowered man. It’s like when boobplate and pants on a woman are considered “good” because it’s not a bikini! You can’t even see his nipples, it’s totally acceptable for combat.

-Icy

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Return of Kanpani Girls

Our second Kanpani Girls redesign. Fixing more soldier waifus!

Elmina

So this character is supposed to be the highest ranking soldier among the Holy Knights (whatever they are in the game) and basically is supposed to be perfect leader and fighter, including über-pretentious part in character description: 

There’s not a single hole in her fighting technique. The spear is actually a perfect metaphor for her existence itself. She very rarely takes center stage. 

Mary-Sue-ish description aside, I gotta admit that Elmina’s stance and *parts* of uniform do inform what a confident authority figure she is. Then there are ridiculous patches of bare skin, schoolgirl face and ridiculously busy costume shape. 

First, obvious thing to fix were the random cutouts. Then I decided that whatever that giant pauldron thingy on her right arm is supposed to be looks just too absurd and uncomfortable to leave it as it is. Instead I recreated her left pauldron best as I could, to make it a simple symmetrical uniform. 

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Next thing was to give her face conveying the experience and age you’d expect from a high ranking officer. I made her look older with a bigger nose, some minor wrinkles and a tiny bit more detailed lips and jawline. Crossing scars over the bridge of her nose communicate that she acquired her mastery of the spear at a cost – no real badass warrior authority should go scarless.
Also she got a haircut. Her cape is epic enough to blow in the wind and the long hair just asked to get stuck in her weapons or armor.

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The rest of the stream I spent reversing all those tiny little ornamental shapes from her uniform into simpler, bigger shapes that don’t tire the eye so quickly. Most such changes can be observed on her greaves, as her legs were the least exposed part of the costume.

~Ozzie

Helga

I decided to tackle the lovingly-rendered but very unfortunately dressed Helga. She has no backstory that I found, so nothing was stopping me from doing whatever I wanted. Insert evil redesigner laugh!

I started by giving her an actual breastplate to replace the…. um. I’m not actually sure what she was supposed to be wearing in the original? It’s not pasties, but there’s not enough coverage to call it a bra… anyway. I got it outta there fast. I also gave her a sleeve while I was at it.

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I used the same breastplate design as I used for my other Kanpani Girl redraw, because the metal bits under her breasts lead easily into it. I just moved it down to that it’s an actual armor. And thanks to feedback on the previous design, I knew to give her a brigandine under that breastplate: that’s what the metal rivets are.

Next, I debated over what to do with her legs. At first, I wanted to give her a tabbard and get rid of her massive skirt almost entirely, but I actually like the skirt. It goes well with her flowy sleeve, and I decided that she was a noblewoman who learned sword-fighting. No backstory, no rules!! It wouldn’t be the most practical, but I decided she still held onto vain nobility ideals and thus kept the skirt. I just made it a little less wide.

I also noticed that her short inside skirt had the beginning shapes of pants, and I ran with that. The trademark Poofy Pants™

make an appearance again, with white tights underneath for contrast. I moved her stocking decorations to her shins and made shoes out of them.

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And finally, I made her actually look determined. She feels like a person who only recently picked up the sword, so no scars for her yet.

I definitely had fun rendering this out, though having to switch to a different idea part-way through once again meant that I didn’t finish this during the stream. I’m better about it now, I swear! 

-Icy