Reblog: See What I Can Draw!: Chun Li Redraw
"This drawing bothered me the first time I saw it and I decided to do a redraw. Of course it had to be a hard pose. I couldn’t pick an easy one where she was sitting down..
First I tried to do her pose, to the best of my ability. I am not an athlete by any means and I had the hardest time try to approximate it. I actually tried to do it while also taking a photo of myself and I nearly fell over several times. The first thing that I noticed was that her foot position was not feasible, nor was it stable to be balancing on one foot and twisting like she is. Second, I could not bend as far back as she was in the photo without losing my balance.
In the top image I roughed out how I thought she was put together. Her ribs were very short and her butt stuck out way too far, in addition to her leg placement/hips were not accurate. In the second pic you can see the pose I came up with after trial and error and looking at my reference pictures. I rotated her somewhat to showcase her butt more, which is what I interpreted was important from the initial image. You can see the comparison to the original.
In the bottom drawing I sketched in her form and added some more weight to her bottom half. I always had the interpretation that Chun-Li was pear-shaped. So I tried to give her a shapely butt and thighs. I also got rid of her balloon boob.
I drew her costume on her and her flyaway hair. In case you didn’t notice (which I didn’t at first) she is taking her bun down. I think the costume sort of ends up making the pose look weird but my intention wasn’t to redesign her.
The problem is that that this pose doesn’t really convey that she is ripping her bun down, the original didn’t do that either. But the point of this exercise was to correct the anatomy so that the new pose was possible. If I were to redo the whole thing then I would pick a different pose entirely to better convey what she is doing.
You know, until you said it here, I had no idea she was taking her hair scrunchie thing off. That at least explains what’s going on. I really like your redraw and what you were able to do with it, even though, as you said, another pose likely would have conveyed the action better.
(Redraw of Chun-Li picture from Street Fighter: Mouse Generation)