-2018- Seeing Red by Eric-3 on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Red Sonja.

I had a lot of trouble getting to this. I don't know if too much time has passed since I last drew that I got rusty again or if I just have random periods of rustiness regardless, but I scrapped 4 pages of attempted drawings before getting this out. And then, even this isn't that good. It was the best I could seem to do that day though.

I had trouble coming up with an idea for a pose for this. All I really knew was that I didn't want to do a blatantly sexy pose. I don't have a problem with that kind of picture in general, but in certain contexts it just comes off way too cheesy or unnatural to me. Like, for this character being a warrior, it just seems out of character. "Oh, I'm in the middle of a battle; I better stick my chest and butt out, because that will help me fight better."

I was looking up pictures just for costume reference, and there's so much of that with Red Sonja. It just looks too fake, like she's posing sexy for a camera and the scene is staged (and I assume cameras weren't around in her time/setting but even if I'm wrong, surely you know what I mean). People don't normally stand that way.

If she were a model or whatever, sure, conveniently sexy poses that are largely impractical outside of having your photo taken would make sense. Or just a regular person, something where it would be more reasonable. That's fine. I don't have a problem with that. But if she's a warrior...no. I wanted this to feel more "real". She's here to fight. She's gonna fight.

I'm not saying people shouldn't draw that; I think people should draw what they want. I'm just mentioning it as my own reasoning for my own drawing.

My first idea was just her standing with weapons out, roughed up like she just took down a bunch of enemies. It was too generic though, and I saw other pictures of her already similar to that.

Then I was doing a bunch of random scribbles trying to find a pose and came up with one that was like her on top of someone and about to bring her sword down into him, from the view of the guy. But then I noticed that her arm, being raised and back (winding up for the attack), was going to largely be covered up by her hair. Or at least the sword would've been covered by her hair.

So I went through 4 pages trying to get something to work. I finally landed on this, which was mostly a tweak of the previous idea. I was pretty frustrated at the time, and I think my frustration influenced the picture. I just wanted to punch something...

I kept this one though because I liked how the face came out. So I tried to make the rest of the picture work around that. It really didn't come out as well as I wanted since parts of it are still very flawed, but I just could not get anything to work better.

The legs are awkwardly posed. The main problem was that I didn't have any space left on the paper to lay it out, so I had to "imagine" the rest of the legs (and some of the surrounding area) and try to do something that would work with the idea, but not actually draw the legs for the most part. It was weird and I didn't really succeed.

Another problem with that is that you can barely see them; the leg on the right (her left) was supposed to be pointing forward somewhat, like in between perfectly forward and perfectly sideways. But since you can barely see it, it's hard to tell and it ends up looking more like it's posed pointing back as if she were doing the splits or something.

I also totally messed up the foreshortening of the arm. For someone that does foreshortening so often, I am extremely bad at it. And what you see here is after I tried to fix it on the computer. The original scan was even worse. I probably should've drawn the hand in the back smaller too, but I was afraid I'd mess up the general drawing of the hand if I erased it and redrew it.

And I'm horrible at low angle shots, so I'm sure there's a bunch more wrong in this.

I tried to colour this to make it look like an old comic like with faded ink, aged paper, halftones (?), etc. It didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, but I spent hours tweaking it and this seemed to be the best I could do.

I think part of the reason it looks unconvincing is that the drawing style doesn't match that era. I only thought of the idea when it came time to colour, so I didn't take it into account while still drawing. Even if I did though, I still don't think it would've improved the effect as much as I would want. I don't normally like trying to copy some other style of drawing anyway and would rather do my own thing.

I only added the white border/panel look to have some white in the picture, so that the idea of it being aged paper/an old comic would be more obvious.

This is for . I hope you like this picture that I just...criticized the hell out of.