SWORDING EVIL IN THE FACE

Another Drawing II piece.

The assignment was supposed to be a self-portrait depicting oneself in the opposite gender, although it had to be a lot more conceptual than just "draw yourself with boobs." The actual gender swap wasn't necessarily an absolute requirement as long as it was saying something interesting about gender ("Gender roles"! Art-buzzword of the decade! Second only to "recontextualized"!).

So, this was playing around with my obsession with adventure/fantasy stories, and the sorts of roles female characters tend to inhabit in reality and fiction. I was trying to convey a sense of self-confidence and action while still retaining femininity. Action movies and a lot of games tend to focus on Lara-Croft-style heroines, which have always annoyed me because there's really no narrative reason for them being female; the character's gender is mostly just an excuse for T&A. I was trying to create a more human protagonist; the fact that she has the confidence to grab a sword and take care of herself is an asset to her character, rather than her sole defining characteristic. Since it's also supposed to be a self portrait it's also somewhat of an inversion of my own personality; as much as I love adventure stories I'm a pretty classical introvert and don't usually enjoy doing things outside my normal comfort zone.


ALL THAT SAID, HOWEVER:
Outside of the context of the class for which I drew this, I don't think any of the concept comes across. It makes sense in the context of an art program, but this is deviantart; I'm posting this to a gallery already full of fantasy landscapes, swords, heroes, and cute girls (actually not all that many cute girls; I always forget that 90% of my girl-drawing attempts have ended in failure and thus aren't displayed here). Plus, I pretty much failed on the self-portrait front; aside from the general fluffiness of her hair she doesn't really look anything like me.
Honestly, you can take it in the context of all that conceptual stuff I just explained, but I'm perfectly happy with it just being a drawing of a cute chick with a sword. Because honestly without all that text it's exactly the same sort of thing I would have drawn in my free time, and it's by far my most successful attempt at cute girl drawing. I mean, her boobs are even on the same axis as the rest of her torso!
(For those of you non-artist-people who occasionally look through this stuff, THOSE THINGS ARE ABSURDLY HARD TO DRAW)




SO ANYWAY,
tl;dr: Cute chick with a sword! Yay!


Charcoal on paper, 42"x26"
Roughly 20 hours of actual work, probably another 10 waffling over the concept and sketching things I ended up not even using, annoyingly enough.