Halloween 2019 Project 1 - Kali of the Two-Six

It's October 30, one day before Halloween. Here we have the first of two project to mark Halloween of 2019, the last Halloween of the decade. 

When I started this image long ago, it was a black and white drawing with no real idea about how I would go about colors. The original character I based her on had one color theme, the character her identity developed into had another. The personality swath she began to cover as a character has yet another series. As a result, the main challenge for me became figuring out exactly where “Kali” – the supposed progenitor of all the Drusilla variants – fits into that pendulum.

Dark Persona

The biggest part of Kali’s persona is the fact that she isn’t actually much like most of the versions of Drusilla I explore, particularly the Drusillas of First Moon and Cromwell. They are far more social, far more outgoing, far more engaging, than Kali herself is. Conversely, the Drusilla in the First Star Saga is far darker than the others, but too uncontrolled. She plays more like the Arachne of Soul Eater, or as if she was infected by Kali’s madness. And this isn’t for lack of skill or grace or beauty. Kali has every bit as much, if not more, than any of the Drusillas. But Kali is also much “darker” mentally. She lacks reserve, discretion, that the others have. I shade her much closer to, arguably beyond, who Arachne was in Soul Eater. The madness effect that Arachne deals in with that series is the very essence of Kali’s being. Much like how Ashura exuded that essence that just drove those who could sense it insane, so does Kali. Not out of any nefarious means or desires, but the sheer overabundance of desires.

If you had to frame who Kali is in the most accurate terms, she is probably Sessyoin Kiara out of Fate/Grand Order. She likes to pursue her own sense of pleasure, regardless of the effect that may have on others, or even herself. But this isn’t centrally focused anywhere. It’s not as though she is filled with lust like Kiara, but that she can be. If she becomes interested in being a masochist, she will become the greatest masochist you’ve ever seen, putting characters like Konosuba’s Darkness to shame. If she wants to be a sadist, she can make Esdeath look like a saint. If the urge strikes her, the likes of the efforts and sacrifice for a Holy Grail war would be equivalent to making a sandwich for an afternoon snack. She wouldn’t, and hasn’t, hesitated to go to the extremes of universal experimentation that would make even the three goddesses of the Tenchi universe stop and think.

Of all the Two-Six, her capriciousness is the most divested from considerations of their impacts. While Ceres may go off from one place to another at the drop of a hat, she is at least weary enough of the impact that can have so she’ll limit her interactions and bonds with others, and try to distance herself before her inevitable departure. Izanami’s actions are focused, despite their terrible repercussions. What might seem like her being capricious is actually true malice. Even someone like Hime who is something of Izanami’s opposite is capricious to a large degree, but only so far as to say she is enforcing a justice that sees her at the pinnacle of authority.

Kali doesn’t concern herself with questions of good or evil, right or wrong. Not because she has some philosophical judgment on the question, but because she simply doesn’t care to be bothered with the question. Whatever catches her interest is hers to explore in any way she wants, to whatever extent she wants, everyone else and their rules or norms or morals, be damned. She pesters Anzushiro, asking permission to start a sexual relationship with Yugi, not because she likes Yugi and wants to be nice and have her sister give him up for her sake, but because she is curious about why Anzushiro loves him, and thinks a fight with Anzushiro would be too much of a pain to deal with just to answer that question.

All of that is to say that Kali of the Two-Six and Drusilla Arenzai maybe be two fruits from the same tree, but they’ve got very different tastes to them. They may be cut from the same cloth, but you’ve got two different outfits going here.

And so, while they’ll obviously look very similar in many ways, they are going to be different in others. That’s why, in this project, I wanted to mute her colors and surroundings. It’s a little funny to think of “mute” colors in an image that features vibrant purple, almost blue, hair, and electric blue pumps and design features on a dress, but those minimal pops in color don’t take away from the deliberate overall feeling of a lack of vibrancy in this image.

Eyes

The primary source of that feeling has to be the eyes. In my continued explorations of eye design and color features in this project series, here is another one for Kali. Drusilla’s eyes, in both Cromwell and First Moon, are the color of pure gold. In First Moon, I introduce the idea that when very upset or using a lot of power, her sclera – the white of the eyes – turns black and you can see a spiderweb pattern in her iris.

I try to hide the spider motif a little more here. I do the two-tone black that some anime tend to do in red or yellow with characters that are supposed to be turning into/have turned into demons. I then make her pupils, in their “slit” shape, a very dark red. Without much imagination, you should be able to recognize the combination of the iris and pupil as the familiar sight of a black widow spider.

The thing is, fully zoomed out, while you can probably see that there is something going on with her eyes, they do mostly look like black holes.

Combine her eyes with her relatively bright colored hair, and her ashen-pale skin tone, she looks like death. She has all of her beauty, but still looks like she cannot be alive. You probably wouldn’t want to approach her in real life, no matter how beautiful she appears.

Physical Profile and Dress Design

And she is supposed to be very attractive. Another subtle nod to her spider theme, she has a very thin profile, seemingly very long limbs. Akin to other characters defined as particularly beautiful in their original source materials like Boa Hancock in One Piece or Euphemia Britannia in Code Geass. Even her neck and fingers have that look to them of being very long. Functionally, she is about as tall as Athena (Boa Hancock) making her the second or third tallest of the sisters at somewhere at or north of 6’.

The dress design is a combination of two anime dresses. The first, evidenced by the sleeves, is Arachne from Soul Eater. That one should be fairly obvious as I use it in most of Drusilla’s artwork. The second, much less obvious, particularly if you’re not an anime fan of a certain age, is from the character of Elizabeth out of the Trigun series.

Elizabeth shows up in all of I think two episodes of Trigun – the one where she is introduced and Vash spends the episode as her bodyguard, and the other being a brief shot of her in the montage at the end of the last episode. As odd as it may seem, my original idea all the way back when I was first starting the Book of the Shadows series, was to have Elizabeth be Yami’s mother. That is why Yami’s mother’s name is Elizabeth. Well, that stuck around for a long time because I never actually began writing much of anything about Yami’s mother. Once I did, however, it became obvious that using Elizabeth, as minimal of a story there was to build with, wouldn’t work. So, I kept the name, but she became more or less an unidentified character in terms of assigning an anime character to her image.

At about that time, I was also working on the story of one of the alternate universes Anzu and Runa visit while chasing down Yugi in Advancing Shadows. In that alternate world, Drusilla is Yami’s mother. So, via that game of “six degrees of separation” I arrived at the idea of this dress design.

Now, the chest portion of this dress has undergone multiple revisions over the years since I first drew it. At first it rose a bit higher, covering more of her chest. Then I decided to make it match Arachne’s more and gave it a web pattern like Arachne’s dress. Then I went back to striking the web design in favor of something more like adult chibiusa/Black Lady’s. Then I struck that and lowered her neckline very low. Then, finally, I built it back up again as seen in this final version. It’s a change that has no real “meaning” in terms of what it matches, how, or why, so it’s about as close to an original design element as I have in this dress.

Accessories and Other Details

The design of her pumps was originally based on something, but I can’t for the life of me remember what. It’s not a particularly fancy shoe design, but I know there was an anime character I based it on for some reason or another. I have no recollection whatsoever who that was now though, let alone why it was seemingly important enough that I remember I did it, but not why.

The background is very simplistic. The original plan called for an originally designed combination of a doghouse and a roost just behind her. As is my intent for the greater project, I want to have all of their spirit beasts represented in the image someplace or another. So, that would require, to some extent, having them interact with the creatures, or providing the associate paraphernalia of keeping such… pets. In my original project, a phoenix was perched on the roost, and there was a spider web on a part closer to the bottom portion where the doghouse portion was.

But my doghouse bird perch wasn’t precisely the sort of design I envisioned, and I wasn’t happy with the design on the phoenix. I’ve decided I would work on a redesign of those elements, but don’t have anything really that good in mind. Not knowing what the design will ultimately look like, I don’t have any idea if it will even fit into this image in any way, so I have no choice but to leave it out. As a result, the actual image here is reduced some. I cropped out some of the space that is supposed to be behind her, to our right. I mostly left the space I did so I can use it as a future spacing reference.

Now, the floor is a special case. This Kali image is just one part of a series of images, comprising the Gathering of the Two-Six project. It was the project for Nehellenia where I decided on the flooring – choosing hardwood instead of carpet, picking a color, etc. But the other parts I’ve completed – Anzu, Hime, Athena – all rest between these two. For the sake of minimizing future work I need to do on this image, I thought it better to leave the floor mainly blank until I fill in that gap between images, rather than drawing in the flooring features and not knowing if they at all will match up. The baseboard’s design is super simple, and only really demarks where the wall ends and the floor begins. There’s less need to guess about dimensions or anything like that, and even if ultimately they aren’t on the exact same latitude, moving one image up or down shouldn’t effect much of anything.

Touching back on color, the main body of the dress is a sort of light purple/lilac color. It’s a very pale color, and I didn’t add any real sheen or shine to give it extra pop. This is deliberately so that it can remain a fairly muted color, trying not to take too much from her deathly pale complexion. It definitely isn’t a silk dress or any such thing. In my memory this color was the same for Elizabeth, though I confess I never went back to check on that, so it’s quite possibly totally wrong. But, nonetheless, it’s a good color for her.

Also, in my mind the bottom trim of her dress was blue, close to the blue I use for the bow and shoes. I can sometimes be overly focused on inconsequential details. In this case, it was the fact that the toe of the shoe poking out beneath the folds of the dress at the bottom would have made them match, thereby the detail of the shoe ending up lost. I gave her red shoes instead, matching the shoes to the band of red across the cleavage of her dress.

Her fan inverts the fan that Arachne has, making the frame black and the inner portion dark grey. The couch is grey because I couldn’t think of a better color. In the Anzushiro image that started the project I originally made it brown, but that was mostly because I was basing the design on a couch at home. I ultimately changed that into a bench. I kept that bench design for Athena’s because I was still working off the elements established in Anzushiro’s. But in reality the original intent was always a couch and those projects will eventually be reworked to meet that.

Having brown wood floors, however, meant that brown material for the couch wouldn’t be a particularly smart design choice. So, I had to come up with something different. I wasn’t completely sure on the material, but I’m mostly of the idea that it will be leather. Blue wouldn’t work well because it is such a dominant color for Anzushiro and Athena’s dresses, and shows up again so much here in Kali’s. Black was a possibility, but I wasn’t too sure I liked that one. White was also a consideration, as were light blue, tan, and various shades of green. There’s definitely a strong possibility I could change this again at some point but for now this light grey seems the best choice.

Final Thoughts

That’s about all there is for this project. It marks the fifth completed entry into the Gathering of the Two-Six project; we’re almost halfway. The good news on that is I do have another image that is very, very, close to being done. The bad news is that I don’t really have much clue on the last six. Serenity’s image will be done next year unless some sort of hiccup develops. I have an idea that I attempted for Nue, but I paused on that when it didn’t go the way I wanted, so I have to figure out if I’m going to start that one from scratch, or rework it until it matches my plans. I have that completed Izanami drawing I need to color, so there’s that too. I don’t imagine that one should be terribly troublesome, but I haven’t given any thought to colors yet. I think it’s suited as a precursor to my All Hallow’s Eve release. I hope you like it. See you again soon.