Monster Girl Drider Kali

It seems like ages ago that I originally started this project. I wasn’t even sure I’d have a project for Halloween this year, but here it is. After releasing my most popular piece several Halloweens ago, I’ve finally brought it back in full color. It’s like the 1950s all over again.

History

The delay on this was brought entirely on indecision and inattentiveness. After the original drawing was put up, I was like, “okay, let’s do this. Coloring time… right after I get this other project going.” And that led to another project, which led to another project, which led to another… you get the idea. By the time I circled back around to this one, I ran into so much indecisiveness it’s unbelievable. Not one color consideration was simply settled. Not one.

Color

I take that back; the eyes were settled pretty easily. I knew right away I wanted to do the yellow on black pigmented sclera. There was no way to make her more creepy from a color and lighting standpoint than to paint her sclera black.

But from there I waffled back and forward on every choice I could make with respect to the colors of everything else. The dress design was borrowed from Kantai’s Koungou, but I didn’t want to copy the colors. Should she be lighter or darker skinned in her monster form? Should her hair be darker or lighter? Should I change the hair color entirely? What color should the spider fur be; black or brown? Should I paint her nails to match her hair, her eyes, her dress? Going through a number of combinations, all of them seemed really off, really bad.

After getting frustrated for a bit, I set it aside. I would come back every once in a while, get upset about my inability to figure it out, try a couple random ideas, and give up again for a while.

The issue comes down to a lack of conviction for any potential idea because each deviates so far from the norm for her. With no unifying concept or theme in terms of color theory on this particular piece, it left it rudderless.

So, here are some rules that this experience has helped me establish for Drusilla/Kali. First, she has to either go dark or super light on hair color. Her native hair color is a purple. It’s not a particularly dark purple, but if you go lighter, it starts to look odd on her. Except that if you go really light, like white, silver, or platinum blonde. So that basically allows me to cut out all the middle ground colors. I also can cut out a lot of the primary colors. I can do yellow, but only if that yellow is platinum blonde. I’m not going to do blue, red, or green because they’re not her colors. Of the secondary colors, the only ones that would align with her are going to be violet and purple.

Skin tone can always be a tricky thing. Too light and it looks like you’ve got a ghost. Attempts to darken it can leave them either looking like they got a crappy spray-on tan, or they’re in blackface. Or you end up with the character in some color that doesn’t match any human you’ve ever seen. My attempts were looking more like the bad spray-on tan sort.

As always it’s best, if you find yourself going off the rails, to take a step back and simplify things. So that is what I did here in the end, instead of trying to make this some ridiculously overly complicated mess.

In terms of the hair and skin tone, I went with what worked for Drusilla Arenzai’s “Beach Day in Cromwell” piece. The hair still ended up being just a little tricky because for whatever reason, despite attempting to compensate settings, it was looking like a different color on my desktop compared to my tablet. Didn’t have the same problem with the skin tone, eye color, or anything else really, so I’ve no idea how that issue came about.

At any rate, I reconsidered the original idea that ostensibly the spider portion of this image is based on the black widow spider. I considered just doing her dress/kimono in the same colors of black and red. Typically for something like this you would see the main body of the outfit in black, with the trim or lining portions in red. I wanted more contrast between her clothes and her spider body, rather than potentially making it seem like the two were somehow blending together. You’d basically have a giant black spot taking up almost half the image. There was also the “not-black black” option, but I’ve made it known before that I’m not terribly fond of that artistic tool. Add to that what I had in mind for background, and it would just have been weird to do it that way in this case.

But the concept still held that it should either way be some sort of darker color. Soul Eater’s Arachne, who serves as the main inspiration for Kali, wears a dress that is that not-black black, so that’s no good. Considering the options, the color of poison in most representations is purple. Thinking that way, some shade of purple would be appropriate. Maintaining that it should be a darker color, I basically took her hair color, played with the red and blue balance, and upped the black level.

I went with red and black for the trim and lining, keeping with the established theme. I chose black for the “stitching” on the sleeves, and the straps binding the front. I also kept the coloring of Arachne’s fan – a dark gray frame with a black body.

That also settled the question of the color of her spider body. My idea for considering brown in the first place was to acknowledge one of the most poisonous spiders in the world, the brown recluse. Kali of the Two-Six isn’t much of a black widow to begin with. While her relationships tend to be less than healthy, they don’t typically fall to the level of a black widow. She is, however, quite the adept crafter of potions and poisons, and her very aura is like a poison (see Soul Eater for details on that). That is how Semiramis from the Fate/Apocrypha series ends up as part of her pantheon.

That said, I drew this image in looking at and under the consideration of a black widow spider. Thinking about deviating from that would make for an interesting alternative project, but for the sake of dispelling the complication that stymied this project so long in the first place, there really was no reason to piece together anything not dealing with a black widow spider.  

Background

For the background, I sort of always had the idea that it would feature spider webs, but hadn’t thought too hard about it. I typically craft my backgrounds to fit the character I’m drawing, particularly as it pertains to colors. Obviously, the real world operates the opposite way, but this isn’t the real world after all.

The idea I had from the start was simply that there would be spider webs in the background. What I wasn’t sure about was whether there would be anything else. Would I do a rustic room covered in webs, a dilapidated version of a modern home, or just some abstract background of cobwebs?

Again here, I decided to make it very simple – a dark background with a very large spider web on which she stands. Given how large she is relative to the rest of the image – the fact that her front legs aren’t even fully in the image – there isn’t much that can be fittingly done for the background without going back and expanding the overall image itself. Expanding the image just to fit more random stuff for a background that won’t end up adding much overall to the story of the image didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe if I was better with backgrounds in general I would feel differently, but just don’t see a reason to here.

I tried to add an appropriate amount of highlight without overdoing it. It is a dark image overall, so having her being too much highlights, defining the highlights too much, would be out of place.

Conclusion

There isn’t much else to say here. There are a few more Kali/Drusilla pieces in the works, but I’ve got no timetable on when those will get done. There is one I’m doing with Drusilla and C.C. that I’m looking forward to finishing soon titled “At The Bistro.” It’s based in the Cromwell Universe and features the two ladies sitting at an outdoor café overlooking a river. The line art on the ladies is all done, so it’s just doing the background the way I want it. I even know most of the colors I’ll be using. I want to release this one no earlier than Valentine’s Day, possibly save it for a springtime date. Don’t make any steady plans for those dates, however. If another project distracts me, or some element of the project holds me up, who knows when it’ll finally get done. But, to be sure, there are plenty of Drusilla projects to come in the future.