Halloween 2016 - Monster Girl Anzu

I hope everyone is ready for a fun Halloween weekend. It's a little odd whenever holidays like this fall on a Monday, but maybe this piece will get you into the mood a little early.

This piece is a part of the Monster Girls of the Two-Six project that I started to show off last year with Kali and Hime. At the time, I mentioned that the entire idea for the Monster Girls line had started with Anzu in the first place, but at the time I hadn’t had a design that looked good for her. The sort of default thinking for me was to pick a dragon from the Yu-Gi-Oh universe, but most are only really recognizable in their full form. You take a Blue-Eyes tail and it doesn’t stand out all that much from any other random lizard or dragon tail. The closest thing to horns it has are the extension of its skull, and the ear-like pieces on the side of its head. In this way, most of the dragons in the Yu-Gi-Oh franchise are either “holistic” types or “skull” types – they either rely on a complete image of them to get the impression, or you need to have their entire skull to go by.

This gets into the entire issue of doing monster-girl works in the first place. How much of the inhuman part are you going to have represented versus the human? Do you give them the hands and feet of a dragon, let them both remain human, or mix – dragon claws for hands and human feet, or human hands and dragon claws for feet? Do you go for a sort of centaur like appearance, the torso of a human attached to the body of a dragon (a la Marik and Ra in the Battle City arc)? It’s a much more nuanced proposition than something like a snake-girl, where there isn’t much else to a snake for you to utilize to begin with.

I haven’t settled the question of claws. I’m thinking I’ll do another image that puts more focus on her hands and/or feet to show my decision off.I debated up to the last moment if to add the dual razor back spine from Slifer. 

I gave her larger and pointed ears just because that’s a staple of many of the Two-Six anyway. This is probably the only non-dragon specific element unique to this image, as Slifer doesn’t have ears. The tail is shorter than it could have been. Especially for an image representing Slifer, I sorta feel now the tail should be longer. At the same time, I didn’t want to make it too big and offset the rest of the image too much. The end of the tail is shaped like Slifer’s.

The other major element, the wings, are also very clearly Slifer’s. I wanted to make them rather big and pronounced, in a grandiose way. The talon protruding from the maxim of the wings are each larger than her head, which was the rough measure I used in framing the size of the wings. The full breadth of her wings is limited by the fact that we can’t see them fully in this piece, their extending off the page, which actually should help to give an idea of how big they must be. I was tempted to go utterly massive, but like the tail, I didn’t want to overly off-balance the image.

Slifer doesn’t have “horns” in the sense of normal animal horns. Instead, it has a “crown”. It’s probably a minor difference in most folk’s eyes, but for this project that difference is important, as it limits the usability of that feature. There isn’t an easy way to have that element represented on Anzu. Dark Magician Girl’s hat has the same general arc to it that Slifer’s “horn” does, but simply having her wearing a hat shaped sort of like Slifer’s head seemed to defeat the purpose of the project. I thought instead about perhaps doing a sort of “Yami Marik” hair trick. Marik’s normal hair is, well, normal. It just comes straight down in a sort of bob-cut. When he changes to Yami Marik, all his hair is sticking up. I thought about basically having a bunch of Anzu’s hair sticking up in the general shape of Slifer’s crown. It is a little awkward looking, but I suppose no more so than the aforementioned Marik, or pretty much any random character from the series you want to pick. 

I started calling this piece Anzushiro, Draco Forma. I've more recently referred to it as Anzushiro the Sky Dragon. Either way, this is the Halloween 2016 art project. Until next time, Happy Halloween!