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.
~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
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.
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.
Bonus for no more “eye” designs on her boobs. I kinda like the skirt I gave her. Not much to say beyond that.
~Ozzie
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.
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.)
[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.
(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.
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. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Gotta Fix Everyone’s Weird Boob “Armor”
I was frustrated with how Marvel’s Valkyrie was just a sequence of weird design decisions. This particular version ticked me off because they had the cool cuirass with the abs, but then the chafing and the metal boob cones…. ugh.
I started with fixing that chest armor: getting rid of the weird metal bra and adding cool (to me, anyway) shoulder guards. I wanted to give her a more powerful look. I added some small dangling leather straps to mirror those on her belt.
When it was time to fix her…. boots? I took the liberty of, at the same time, painting over poor Hel’s painful-looking <biggest air-quotes ever> “armor.” I actually started giving her a more reasonable breastplate but gave up. That would be a project all on its own.
Those leg ropes seemed very stupid to me, and they didn’t go with the rest of the design, so I gave her plate armor that kept the small shapes. I then gave her simple pants to be the large shape in the design. In hindsight, I feel like I should have gone through with the metal gauntlets I wanted to give her but bailed on.
Finally, I replaced her Generic Pout™ with a more determined expression. Now both ladies can go forth and fight whoever it is they’re fighting.
-Icy
