Insectoid Talia Toni: This is my first
Insectoid Talia
Toni submitted:
This is my first time submitting, so I apologize for post mistakes. A little while back I saw this picture on the blog…
I can’t help but have a little respect for the picture (Though it probably doesn’t deserve it.) because it seems to me like the artist was actually trying to give her muscles, which explains the bulging forearms and thighs, but wanted to keep a feminine delicacy, which explains the tiny joints and waist. I don’t think it’s sexist or impossible to try and combine those two traits in a body, but it appears he/she doesn’t know how to do it correctly.
Besides the obvious pinchyness I noticed a couple other issues that I decided to fix with drawing.
Working from head to toe the changes I made are:
1. Her hair seemed very strange to me. First I saw the way her hair hugged the base of her skull, and had thought it was clipped in the back. Though it’s hard to tell with the shadow, I have since decided that wasn’t the case but I’ve kept it in the redraw because it’s a bit more sensible. Besides that, the end of her hair is a bit too gravity-defying for my tastes so I hacked some of it off to give logic to the curling effect.
2. I hadn’t realized this until I traced the picture but her neck was really long. I shortened it up a bit and in the process I accidentally made her face a bit rounder. I think it looks better that way.
3. the perspective from her neck to her left shoulder was off, so i brought her shoulder socket backward a little.
4. The way her right shoulder is positioned, the placement of her right arm makes no sense. I could have either adjusted the shoulder and upper-arm to work straight, or I could have bent the elbow to match the angle of the shoulder. I chose door number two. This was a merely aesthetic decision. If her left arm is swinging around with a bent elbow I think it would feel the most natural for the other one to do that too. I don’t know the best way to hold a gun in this situation, or if Talia would even care about that sort of thing.
5. I don’t think I have to mention what was wrong with her breasts. I tried not to mess with their size as I altered the shape, but it’s hard for me to tell. I’m not sure if they sit too low on her chest or not so I just left that alone.
6. Her right arm was both longer and meatier than her left arm. I fiddled with the right a bit, and lengthened the upper arm on the left, but it’s still not perfect. I also evened out the muscle tone to the best of my ability. I’m not so knowledgeable about muscles.
7. Even after I had relocated her left shoulder, the line of her back didn’t match the line of her neck. She would have had a very strange hump were we to look at her from another angle, so I tweaked that as well. I think it was drawn that way as a trick to emphasize the smallness of her waist.
8. Not only did she have a ridiculously skinny waist, her pelvis seemed to be a little too long, and rounding itself backward in a way I had never encountered before. I suppose that’s the effect of doubling bubble-butt with sway-back. I tried to keep her waist skinny to preserve whatever she was supposed to look like before which ended up giving her a higher waist than she had before, but I couldn’t bring myself to save the extreme roundness of her butt, because I couldn’t draw it in a way that would look like it occurred naturally from that angle.
9. The legs caused me the most trouble. No matter what angle I positioned the right leg, nothing satisfied me. Finally I settled on a smaller stride than she had before, which would also give a closer match to the sense of speed I get from the way her hair flows. I lengthened the right leg as well, and adjusted the muscle joint ratio a bit, but I kept the outward swivel on both the legs because that’s actually something I can do without much pain.
In the final redraw I did three things:
1. I defined her hands and gave her the gun. Her hands were too large in the original, so I shrunk them down for accuracy even though my style of drawing has big hands too. I had heard somewhere that your hand is supposed to be about the size of your face, so I tried to judge it that way, but I feel like I overshot the mark and now they are too small.
2. I gave her clothes. In theory her clothes aren’t that illogical for who she is and what the scene seems to be, so I didn’t really do anything to change them beside removing the shrink wrap effect around her breasts.
3. I shaded her in. I haven’t really learned how to shade things yet, so the only changes I made to the shading were to take away weird shadow streaks that shouldn’t exist, make sure all the shine spots are consistent with a light source coming from her upper right, and to add some dimension to the right leg which had originally been blacked out.
Nice redraw and thorough explanation for all the things you noticed and changed. :) You’re right that those bulges are meant to be muscles.