Tag: redraw

Posted on

Guild Wars 2′s Sexy Spooky Witch

Kept especially for Halloween, my redesign of witch’s outfit from Guild Wars 2 (human version). 

So, what does the original give us? Amazingly washed out monochromatic color palette, generic witch hat, bare thighs and shoulders, majorly over-designed bone ornamentation that looks super stabby (not to mention, frames her boobs)… and, of course, male version which looks nothing alike. 

After covering the gratuitous bare skin parts with poofy pants and sleeves, I decided to stick to two priorities: 

  • Make her color scheme more balanced (original, especially model sheet version I found on GW2 Wiki, is basically all just one shade of emerald!). Hope that dark teal, moss green and ebony compliment each other better when not so washed out.
  • Turn those needless small ornamental shapes into bigger, less distracting and less likely to stab her if she leans down. Obviously most of what was on her chest had to go in favor of something that doesn’t focus on the bebws.

All the actual design details and shapes were mostly incidental, as I was changing everything as I moved along, over two or three separate streaming sessions. 

image

I guess I could have gone the path of what we did to Saint Seiya Online and change the lady’s design to that of her spooky (warlock? lich?) skeleton male version, but I don’t like his design either, just for reasons different than overt sexism.
His bone motif is somehow even more overdone than hers (three little skulls on chest, one on right arm, another one on his… crotch?) and there’s the vague “witch doctor” vibe to him that puts this in exotification category. 

image

I decided to go with the traditional sexified male armor path of stripping him down to as little clothing as possible without changing the silhouette. And gave him face skin, because if lady witch doesn’t have a skull head, why should he?

Also made that weirdly suggestive crotch skull actually frame his package with its scary jaw, because we would never miss such opportunity.

~Ozzie

Posted on

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.

image

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.

image

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

Posted on

Heroes of Newerth’s Boudica Legionnaire Cleavage Johnson 

This redesign happened on a day of very annoying technical difficulties. Since my computer was refusing to cooperate, I ended up reaching for some easy fix material to Heroes of Newerth, a game prominent for its creative bankruptcy. HoN’s image gallery is our emergency stash of subjects for bingos and/or streams. 

This boobtastic, vaguely-Pict lady looked so amazingly generic that we didn’t care to look up whether she’s an actual named character (apparently she’s supposed to be queen Boudica’s legionnaire). Instead, we dubbed her Cleavage Johnson and I proceeded to fix her namesake. 

All it did to make her look like a somewhat competent warrior was to cover her cleavage and belly (while making her armor not-boobplate and adding a bit of girth to her improbable waist), then giving her kilt a couple more inches and getting rid of its shmexy thigh cutout. 

image

Frankly, while the changes were deliberately small and easy to do, I think just that little made her silhouette stand out from the background a bit more. Amazingly, bare skin and meaningless tribal tattoos* somehow didn’t prevent her from blending with the environment. 

~Ozzie 

*While I’m in no way versed in design and meaning of Pict body art, I can safely assume that HoN pulled those straight out of their butts, considering its hugely racist record of “exotic” culture depictions.

Posted on

Boring LoL ladies redesign, Part 2

Unimaginative and pointless bikini armor? Clothes that don’t make sense? A two-color color scheme? We’re got it all, on this week’s League of Legends redesign feature.

(We included a bonus image cause the redesign picture doesn’t show the full Generic-ness in all its glory. Enjoy!)

<part 1: Ashe>  <@leagueofsexism>

Janna

Boy, do I know how to pick the worst ones. So according to her (old) backstory blurb, Janna is an Extremely Talented wind sorceress, to the extent where she sort of became one with the wind. She’s aloof and fickle, focused entirely on her craft. Maybe that’s why the designers thought they could dress her in a swimsuit? “She doesn’t care what she’d wear, right? Just put her in underwear!” 

I figured the opposite: being surrounded by wind (she floats and everything), she’d probably want to be warm. I decided on a sleeved poncho so that she would be warm, while also wearing a loose cloth that can flutter in the wind, for the Aesthetic.

image

I made it a single, large, flowy shape, keeping the smaller shapes to frame it. I found some fun winter tights online that I used as reference. I made them asymmetrical because besides the staff, her design would end up perfectly symmetrical (hair doesn’t count), and I try to avoid that when I can. I kept the original color scheme to a simple light/dark greys and blue, colors that I associated with the wind and clouds.

The blurb said her powers gave her an “otherworldly appearance,” but her face was just bland and generic, like most of the LoL ladies. I gave her a more elongated, narrow face, with wide narrow lips. The hair detail was mostly just me trying to work with the low-res original I had. I did shorten her bangs, to unify the hair shapes.

image

Finally, I changed her awful staff into a more simple wind-looking shape, and added some orange to her tights to tie the color of the gems in the staff to the rest of the design.

For people who keep up with the LoL lore (the LoLore, if you will), this design will not work for her new backstory as a wind spirit. Still, for the original concept, I’m pretty proud of this one. I feel like it’s one of my better full redesigns. It did take me longer to do than a single livestream, but I think it was worth it.

-Icy

Posted on

Boring LoL ladies redesign, Part 1

League of Legends, despite having maybe two highlights and occasionally attempting to improve, generally SUCKS at female character design. For more details as to why, consult our related blog, @leagueofsexism

Ashe

LoL heroines were among the first stream redesigns by Icy, but this was my first attempt at redoing a lady champion. I chose Ashe, the archer.
While she has completely serviceable color scheme and some nice looking shapes in cape, hood and limb departments, her core costume is just a short dress with deep cleavage and fabric belt. Also nipple adornments ¯_( ͠° ͟ʖ ͠° )_/¯ 

Since LoL fails at giving most female characters distinct facial features, I felt obliged to change this generic oval face with tiny nose and pouty lips into something more interesting. Now her face and nose are longer, with sharper jawline and cheekbones.

image

I decided that instead of her ghastly pale skin, the design should be broken up white elements that will compliment her hair and belt.
You can never go wrong with Elizabethan pants. I’m especially proud of the matching poofy sleeves broken up by golden arm braceletes that were already there.
Obviously, I wouldn’t leave ornaments on each of her boobs, so I reduced it to a single one at the center of her chest. And her pauldrons no longer just hover on her shoulders, they (and presumably, the cape) are connected now at the sternum.

image

Last change, suggested by Icy, was a codpiece, matching the period fashion of her pants. Yes, my redo of Ashe is an openly trans lady, because why not? 

All in all, I’m quite satisfied with how I managed to keep the silhouette and shape language relatively unchanged, while adding some more interesting stuff where gratuitous skin displays were before. 

~Ozzie 

Posted on

Return of the Sexy SMITE Gentlemen 

After the last time we sexyfied SMITE’s male gods, it was time to get back to it. After all, there was such an inequality among the character designs: the men were almost never allowed to be hot! We couldn’t have that.

Hercules

I decided to go for the easy choice, Hercules (not Heracles, for some reason?), mostly cause I hated almost everything about his original design. Not even from a not-sexy-enough standpoint, just in general. That ugly face, the weird proportions (that lion head is like 4 times bigger than his), even the colors. So I changed all of that crap.

I made his head bigger and made him look younger, more innocent. I took away all of his ugly clothes. There isn’t even a loincloth there. I moved the lion’s head into his hand instead to cover his uh… lion, as it were. I decided to give him a furry little cape in its place on his shoulder so that his beautiful face wouldn’t be literally overshadowed.

In the end, I was trying to shade the lion so that it contrasted against Hercules’ skin, but I should have just made the mane dark brown instead of sticking to the original color scheme. But I think now he’s worthy of his Roman depictions.

-Icy 

Loki 

The Norse god of mischief was always plenty intriguing, even before Tom Hiddleston made Sexy Loki a thing. So I decided to very unsubtly make it clear with my redesign – by showing as much skin as possible short of making it porn. 

In real bikini armor fashion, I got rid of almost all the clothes Loki had other than the sash, loincloth and armoring on his limbs. Made his skin a bit lighter and less sickly colored, because while we’re all for Norse characters being more than just white, it’s less problematic to sexualize a white dude than a man of color. Hope you all like those lovingly rendered muscles, I spent a lot of time painting them! 

image

I also replaced his edgy hood with long fiery red hair, more traditional for the depictions of this character. Another, more subtle touch was the scar on his lips, from the time he was punished by having his mouth sewn shut. 

A god who can get himself in and out of almost any trouble by shapeshifting and seducing whoever, including a horse, should really wear his sexuality on his sleeve!

~Ozzie 

Posted on

If You Hate It, Then You Should Have Put a Sweater on It (and we did)

We wanted to do a silly stream where we put sweaters on a few poor ladies drawn for Applibot’s ridiculous requests. We apologize in advance for any discomfort caused by looking at the originals.

Hoo boy. The Rain Goddess, as she is called, from the Totally-Not-Collectible-Cheesecake-Game Legend of the Cryptids. (Although I couldn’t find her page on their wiki, maybe she was removed.) I have mixed feelings about this one, because on the one hand, I’m glad I could give her a sweater, but on the other, I end up scrolling past her original picture every time I look through my BABD image folder. It’s like looking into the Void. Or as the young’ins are calling it, a Cursed Image.

Since she’s a rain goddess (I guess? that’s what the artist called her), I googled “rain sweater” for inspiration, and found this lovely children’s sweater design.

image

It was perfect, really. Most of the stream time was spent rendering this out so that it would somewhat match the original style. If nothing else, the artist had a great technique. It’s a shame about the subject matter, is all.

The final touches were on her face, where I gave her more of a smirk instead of a pout, and made her mascara/eyeliner run a little. 

May the Rain Goddess be comfy and warm in her bright rain sweater. While kneeling in the ocean. I couldn’t fix that part. Or her evolved form.

-Icy

There’s no-one who needs a cozy sweater more than Arctic Permafrost Empress (also from Legend of the Cryptids), both due to her icy domain and one of the most eyes-melting (:P) costumes. 

I referenced some batwing sweaters for this, and since one-color garment looked a tiny bit bare, I decided to paint great tits similar to the ones from the Sadira redo post and made them into a fun puntastic print on the sweater. (Edit on the left)

image

I also changed her facial features to be more distinct and replaced her boring makeup with some blue face paint (which I only hope doesn’t appropriate any culture), just to make her tad more interesting than Random Supermodel #05867 

Here’s the original artist’s blog post, with some references he used for the Empress’ design. Amazingly,  seems like he came up with the weird lingerie shapes almost entirely on his own (or at Applibot’s request?). 

~Ozzie 

Posted on

Fire Emblem Gals Part 1

We are assured that Fire Emblem is great game franchise with engaging characters. We have to take the readers’ word for that, because we always find a distinct dissonance between how FE female characters look and what their bios tell us about their stories and personalities. This week, my take on Nowi, the loli dragon.

Nowi 

Nowi of Fire Emblem Awakening embodies the “beloved” trope of a centuries-old being taking on the appearance of an underage girl… Who is open as a romance option to the player character. Never forget that Awkward Zombie comic which makes fun of it! 

image

“She chose to wear that!” is a bullshit excuse for a grown woman character running around a battlefield in a bikini, let alone for a thousand year old magical creature who also chooses to have the body and face of a child.

Since she’s really a dragon and probably needs no armor, the goal of redesign was to give her clothes that would look appropriate (rather than protective) for someone who takes form of roughly a 12-year old. 

I actually found the color scheme and many shapes in Nowi’s costume very good, just wasted because the focus was on showing skin and adding too many decorations. 

I decided that her teeny tiny scaly bra would make a good vest, if put on top of a crop t-shirt with the same lace finish as those white gloves… which she wears under the black gloves?
Then, since I liked the scale pattern a lot, I recreated it also on her belly. Is that a matching undershirt or her real dragon skin? Who knows! It looks cool. 

image

The area between her belly and knees was made of pure visual noise. It was sexualized and overdesigned at the same time.
The only ridiculous thing I decided to leave in were the crossing belts, because they look cool enough and aren’t implausible… Provided that I added belt loops to her pants. Speaking of which, fetishy short shorts connected to stockings with garter belts had to go, for obvious reasons. 
Since her shoes had such a strange shape, I decided to turn them from thigh-highs with inexplicable ankle boots bottom into tights and ankle boots. All it took was to reverse and change the hem of the boots into that of short pants. 

image

Ribbons weren’t a bad idea on their own, but they just completely didn’t belong as decoration on her sides, so I got rid of them and just transplanted the long tails onto her chest ribbon, making it both cuter and a more prominent splash of pink on her upper half.

All in all, it’s one of my favorite, while most subtle, redesigns. Probably also my best simulation of the original’s coloring style. I really hope it managed to turn creepyness of a sexualized childlike character into cuteness.

~Ozzie 

Posted on

Saint Seiya Online SWITCHEROO Part 2: Empowering the gentlemen! 

In the latter part of our Saint Seiya redesign stream (or, for Ozzie, out of technical difficulties, last Saturday >_>), we doubled down on the switcheroo aspect and swapped armors around. Icy did the sexy male version of the blue knight, while Ozzie took on the male bronze knight. 

Well, considering the blue lady’s… creative design, I had no shortage of material to work with. Besides transplanting the boob window breastplate and giving him the same mankini-adjacent undergarment, I decided to switch the original boring stockings out for more interesting ones, with lace! Premium stockings.

I gave him a softer facial expression, to match our lady’s pout, and made his right hand less aggressive. I decided not to give him heels, but I gave him a booty. And last but not least, I gave him glorious mustache-shaped body hair! Thank you to the person who suggested it! 

image

Does every sexy boy I redesign for this blog have very defined junk? … The answer is probably yes. I definitely had a lot of fun with this one, despite this shading style that I had a hard time emulating.

-Icy 

Despite the ugly “muscular wide-shouldered male is equivalent to a lady with big boobs and wide hips” motif, the bronze knights had one thing in their favor… the dude has his oblique muscles exposed equally to the female version! Now all I had to do is to recreate all the other weirdly exposed spots from her costume on his. 

First thing I decided to do was to make his pose more equal to hers without just straight-up copypasting her legs onto him. Instead, I switched his leg position to simulate her sexy strut, then slightly changed forearm position to be closer to hers. Then I allowed myself to replace his right hand with hers, which is posed less aggresively. And of course, I left the long nails on 😉 

His pants are now just underpants and thigh-high stockings. He also acquired high heels. I wondered for a while how to turn his breastplate into something similar to the boobplate with window for each breasts, and finally decided just to copy her piece and reshape it to match his pecs. 

Major negative (other than double standard, that is), was the armor’s color scheme that blends with their skin tone. If it wasn’t against the idea of our exercise, I’d probably slightly adjust those colors to contrast better, then the pec windows would be more obvious. Oh well.

~Ozzie 

Posted on

Saint Seiya Online SWITCHEROO Part 1: Armoring the ladies!

This stream redraw session was heavily inspired by this reblog we did from @amusing-saint-seiya and the exercise @costumecommunityservice proposed in the post we reblogged ages ago. 

The idea is to take two gender disparate version of the same costume and make them equal to one another, by either basing male version on female’s or the other way round. 

We concluded that Saint Seiya Online, which we bingoed twice since, is a perfect material to try this out on, as their concept art (credit to @saintseiya-zone for posting them!) includes most armors in both male and female version, which are basically always textbook examples of double standard in costume design.

Prepare for this being a double feature. Today we’re posting female knights equalized with their male counterparts. On Friday come the same male knights sexified to be as empowered as original forms of their female equivalents.

First thing I noticed about the blue-white knights is that since the dude one happens to be rather androgynous and strikes a flamboyant pose, designers doubled down on “feminizing” the lady one with pigeon-toed pose and super bingo-able version of the outfit. The two share very similar body type, so I concluded that pasting his parts onto her verbatim would work perfectly. 

First thing to do was to give her his legs and right hand, so she can strike a power pose instead of generic dainty passive body language completely disparate from her male counterpart’s. 

image

Then the task was relatively easy: paint over all those completely out of place holes in her outfit, give her waist a little more plausible girth and shrink her high heels to be exactly the same size as the guy’s. 

It’s actually quite upsetting how the developers put in an active effort into ruining perfectly fine costume just to communicate that the lady version is different. 

~Ozzie 

I will fully admit that I probably? cheated by cutting the red guy’s chest right off of him (misandry?) and pasting it onto the lady, but I have good reason! We so often see strong women characters who are supposed to have a more “masculine” muscled look, but it never actually gets to the part where they don’t have an hourglass figure with the same old narrow shoulders. (See Overwatch’s Zarya and her most narrow shoulders.) So I wanted this lady to be beefy as heck. 

To me, it seems like the artists’ definition of “beefy” for women was just a bigger rack and thiccer hips, and that wasn’t doing it for me. I made her shoulders way wider, stole the guy’s entire torso, and narrowed her hips. You also can’t ever have too much biceps. There are women who look like this, believe it or not.

image

(A minor thing, but I shortened her nails as well.)

For people who may not like this one because she looks too much like a dude… sometimes people do look like that. And maybe the problem is with our definitions of “manly” and “girly.” Why even cisnormativity.

-Icy