Have Mercy!so I was earning my centaur badge(got it! gimme gimme gimme!) and I saw this, atrocious thing: http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/post/13655325369/anita-blake-vala-mal-doran-mercy-thompson#disqus-thread
and because my sister and I are HUGE Patricia Briggs fans(her more than me), I had to redraw this terrible thing. Mercy was glaring at me like, “you know me, give me my personality and story back!” so I did.
fig 1: the unedited coverfig 2: the cover, plus the structure drawn over it.
fig 3: just the structure
fig 4: my own structure. getting a feel for the pose.
fig 5: I clean up my lines, still getting a feel for the pose I do the basic body shape. her butt looks big, but at this point I don’t really care, because I can fix that later. I throw down a background, too. Judging by the cover, with her sitting on a craggy outcrop with wolves behind her, she should either be in her coyote form, or naked(because she’s naked when she changes back from coyote form), so I change that to her car repair shop that she owns, with a stool and a toolbox.
fig 6: I put in clothes, and try to fix that hulk of an arm she has. because the color of the hat blended into the background in the original, and in this version she’s in her shop, I exchange the hat for a wrench. also, I noticed that in the original it looks like both her arms are resting on the same knee, so I fixed that, too. The original clothes looked cold, too, (although she does run around in November in her underwear sometimes) so I put her in a t-shirt and cut offs. I like the boots, though, so I kept those, and the way she was combing her hair with her fingers was really natural to me. I also kept the coyote head in the background, but just the head because the body of the torso looked really short to me, because of the way the hat blended in. I also changed the text to “mooncalled”, since that’s the name of the book. I noticed later that if I were doing the cover, I could have her foot resting on the author’s name., so I like it.
fig 7: I throw down colors. Since Mercy’s half-native-american, I gave her a brownish skintone to reflect that. probably a bit dark for her heritage, but she looks better than the original. I add a stained t-shirt(for working), and the toolbox is based off of those black ones with the red hinges that I loved to look at in my dad’s workshop when I was little, but I tone the colors down so it doesn’t grab the attention away from Mercy. I also color the coyote in with something similar to her skintone, then add a few darker splotches the shade of her hair. I decide that I like the sketch enough that I’ll probably do a full-blown painting later.
Being a big Mercy Thompson fan myself, I’m happy you chose this image to redraw. :) I like what you came up with because it matches more the way she’s described (and dresses) in the books.