So this is Mermista, of Netflix’s new She-Ra series. I like her in this series a lot. She’s got the deadpan snarker gimmick, combined with a really exotic design that souldn’t work with her dry valley girl-esque voice but kinda does. I wanted to do a quick and simple pic of her before delving into a bit more (I’d like to do pics of her with both She-Ra and Glimmer, similar to the She-Ra/Glimmer pic I did before). There might be more simple Princesses of Power pics like this to come in the future, as well.
So I watched the new Netflix She-Ra and really loved it. Before I’d even finished the series I was busy working on this pic, because I know from experience that if I put off drawing a show until after I’ve watched it I lose some momentum and never get around to doing the pic (a lot of shows I was really excited to draw when I watched them I haven’t gotten to yet). So I got this out, and due to the high-energy I was feeling (it’d been a while since I’d drawn anything that wasn’t a commission or a reward or something like that), I ended up drawing the concept from several angles and liking them a lot. So I combined them here into what I think is a fairly unusual sort of pic from me, but I’m really happy with it. I really like the art direction of the series, almost every single character interests me and is on my radar, so I hope I can come back to it later and do some more with these characters. My main interests in the series are all yuri pairings, but there are some straight and gay possibilities I might try out, too.
As for the two here, I wanted to do something cute with Glimmer because I ended up liking her way more than I thought I would. I paired her with She-Ra because, well, it made sense and I wanted to draw the title character in my first outing with the new series. I drew She-Ra a bit more full-bodied than she looks in the show, but I justified it to myself as her body being less on display in her She-Ra outfit, which I think is meant to be more like armor than regular clothes. Adora is smaller than She-Ra in this series, so if I get to do a Glimmer/Adora pic down the road they’ll be a lot closer to the same size.
Hopefully you can’t tell, but this is an old picture. I first drew this in November of 2014, and it’s been sitting incomplete in my work folder ever since. For some reason I got the urge to come back to this one, so I cleaned up the art a bit and sketched up a background (in 2014 I was still mostly using gradients and the like). I’m actually really happy with the final result; I think it holds up better than I had originally expected.
The Master of the Universe franchise is one I’m always surprised I haven’t done more art of. This was one of my earliest cartoon relationships, and it was basically everything Dragon Ball Z is to me now before DBZ had entered my life. I was very young when I first watched stuff like He-Man, She-Ra, Thundercats and Voltron (these four shows are forever tied to my memory for that reason, despite only two of them having anything to do with one another). Perhaps it’s just how long I’ve known these shows that keeps me from thinking to draw them more often, like how I keep wanting to do more Hannah-Barbera cartoons but only seem to fart out one or two Scooby-Doo pics a year.
In 2014 I had a newfound love affair with Filmation’s cartoons. Not just He-Man and She-Ra, but also BraveStarr and Blackstar. I tried to watch some of their older action cartoons in the same vein as these shows, but for some reason had a hard time finding them (even Blackstar and BraveStarr were hard to get my hands on). I really love the corny, goofy charm of these shows, and of course the large cast of colorful characters with the bodies cut from marble. I could probably base my entire career just drawing the women of He-Man and She-Ra, if I wanted to. I really should come back to this franchise more often.