Social Profiling № 4: Annette

Up until last week I knew bugger all about She-ra. Actually, that's not entirely true; I knew that she existed (in a not existing because she's fictional kind of way), I knew roughly what she looked like, and I knew she was the Princess of Power (and Eternia) and sister of He-Man. How I knew even this is a mystery to me as I've never seen an episode of the cartoon, or seen one of the action figures (as far as I can recall). I have to wonder if she made guest appearances on He-Man and I know her from those, in much the same way as Dora the (bloody) Explorer and Go Diego Go (hell of a name that) turn up on each others shows and yell at each other for half an hour at a time while solving simple issues in the most complicated way imaginable*.

Anyway, I knew very little about her, but this is no longer the case thanks to Annette, as you will see...

Click it for ENORMITUDE!

Yes, She-Ra is blonde, so clearly this is not really She-Ra. It is Annette in the last of the set of four profile pictures I decided to do for friends on Facebook (if you missed them you can find the others here, and here, and also here).

I've known Annette since forever. That's not actually true,but I've known her long enough that I have no recollection of meeting her for a first time. I know it was long before she turned 18 because she turned 18 on the same trip to Florida that Owain did, and I'd known her for some years prior to that. So we go back a ways.

Despite this I know probably as much about her as I did about She-Ra. Isn't that terrible? Oh, I know a lot about who she was, but much less about who she is now. Since we last really hung out (no, not like that, just platonic) lots has happened - it's been a looooong time. Far too long now I come to think of it. Anyway, the upshot of this is that I was left with a conundrum when it came to painting her picture. What to paint it of (You know the answer to this because you've seen it, but bare with me 'k)?

I could take the easy way out and just paint a picture directly from a nice profile pic (as I did with Owain, something I've already mentioned regretting), but that wasn't appealing.  At one point I was going to do her stepping out of the TARDIS (stop it will you? Platonic remember?), but while that was a reasonable idea it wasn't a great one, so I moved on. Eventually, after fretting over it for a while, I looked through the available pictures again and saw this one:

Now this time around I was tired, and the thumbnail made it look as though the fillies right ear was a Unicorn horn.  This seemed promising.  Then I found another profile pic of She-Ra (I can only assume it was from when everyone put up a favourite comic/cartoon character as a profile pic just before Christmas).  Even more promising!  Did She-Ra ride a white horse?  I had vague notions that she may have even ridden a Unicorn.  I looked it up.

She did have a white unicorn... With Rainbow wings.  Called Swift Wind.

I'll wait while that sinks in. Yes, She-Ra's horse was named after a quick chuff. You can't make this stuff up - although clearly someone did.

Anyway, other than having the universe's most flamboyant steed She-ra turns out to be a bit of a badass, and she sports a nice dress to boot. My course was set; Tonight Mathew, Annette will be She-Ra (That's a British reference by the way - Trust me non-Brits, they're rolling in the isles... oh never mind).

Firstly though I had to do something about the horse. It's a beautiful horse, but it's not particularly lively. Some reference hunting was needed. While I was at it I got a different picture of Annette, and references for the wings and dress and so on. Here are the most relevant.

Once I had that lot I started sketching.  The initial sketch was OK, but I didn't have photo of Annette open at the time, so I threw in a head from memory.  Once I'd bothered to dig out her mugshot I went back and fixed it.  Turns out Annette has a really difficult face to draw.  You can see she's very attractive from the photos, but she's got one of those faces that is hard to capture.  One pencil line's width off and your left with a picture that looks nothing like her.  I struggled with it for quite some time.  Eventually I said "Hell with this, I'll just trace her face!", brought in the photo to trace, scaled it and lined it up only to discover that the one I'd drawn already was pretty much exactly the same, just her hair line was wrong.  So I didn't trace it after all since her hairline would be hidden anyway. Hurm.

Here's the final sketch I worked from if you're interested:

So from there the rest was just painting. Rather than post a lot of images I'll just do that thing with the Animated gif so you can see the progression. Like so:

And there you have it.

I'm not totally happy with the results to be honest. Her anatomy is a little off, It doesn't look quite as much like her as I would have liked, the gold is a little unimpressive and her belt and leg are wonky, but I learned a lot and Annette seems to like it, which are the important things.

I did cheat a little with the colour correction (Where the dress and horse pop from grey to white in the image there). It was that or do a lot of repainting, and I was feeling lazy. Also, feathers are sods to paint, just so you know.

So the experiment is at an end. I may do it again some day, and I may paint some of those who weren't chosen as one of the four just for fun, although in those cases it'll be just a speed paint of a photo rather than a custom job. These really took somewhat longer than I'd intended - but I hope you'll agree that the extra time was worth it.

Incidentally I clearly lied when I said I'd have something to post between the final two social profiling posts. I have no defense (Other than illness and a weakness for video games), I've been slacking. I vowed to myself that I would do something creative every day, and I have done just that - unfortunately not all of it is "artistic" in the manner that would end up on the blog here. That said, I have some other things to post, I just haven't done it yet...

* If you hadn't realised already, I dislike Dora and Diego with a passion, but I'll sit through it with my Son. I do tend to spoil it for him a bit by pointing out the stupidity of digging under a wall when you could just go over it - or even around it as it's only 10 feet long... or was that Mickey? I should stop now shouldn't I?