InsaneJournal

IBARW requests, day 2
Images, same as before, 500x500px.

First: Beatriz da Costa (Fire), for kefanii.

This image kind of became my effort to show a side of Fire that the comics don't usually let her express because the writers don't want to bother trying. The comics have a tendency to hypersexualize Beatriz to emphasize her ethnicity - rather than making her look less white by changing how they draw her facial features and telling the colorists to stop making her skin tone paler than Tora's - so I wanted to draw her fierce and kicking ass instead. The pose is a ready position in Brazilian jiujitsu; nobody except Greg Rucka seems to remember Fire is a Brazilian spec-ops agent with military training and thus would know BJJ and probably a half-dozen other MMA styles because it would be a mandatory part of her training program in order to qualify for spec-ops, and it would be ridiculous to believe she doesn't keep in shape. My personal interpretation of what's going on is that she was practicing with either Sasha at Checkmate HQ or with Tora in the apartment they're currently sharing according to canon, and somebody just decided it'd be a grand idea to bust in and interrupt her practice time, so somebody is about to get an ass-whuppin'.

Second: Blaise Zabini, for wyomingnot.

I've never drawn a piece of HP fanart before, and so I did not realize how much trouble Blaise's wand was going to give me, or how hard it would be to find color refs for what I wanted to do. I ended up having to use an image of a kid in a Slytherin robe costume for reference material. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but I am fond of the desaturated colors and Blaise's face. Which is good, because I really worked my ass off to get the features as close to right as possible. It does, unfortunately, mean most of the time I spent sweating over the colors is buried, but that's a small price to pay for making it look the best it could. I have no idea what he's smiling about; I just wanted him to look like he was enjoying the hell out of himself ... probably while trying to kill somebody, because I figure this is post-DH and so the Death Eaters and their children would be out and about and spreading murder and mayhem and all that. Eating babies. Whatever it is Death Eaters do for fun.