“Silly Caucasian girl likes to play with Samurai swords”

Badass, badass, badass!!! I love O-Ren Ishii because she’s… well, yeah, a badass. But also because she’s a badass with honour, and style, and a strange vein of humility running alongside all the hubris.

And also because Lucy Liu is freaking gorgeous in this movie, and I really like drawing pretty people.

I started this image as a test sketch to try a new workflow and some new tools and brushes, but I decided to include it here, as part of my “work” because to me it represents an interesting moment in my learning process that I want to remember. I’ve been playing with these marks I call “sand garden squiggles” lately, using them to describe shapes and transitions, and sometimes just as elements of visual interest in otherwise “flat” colour areas. They can be traced back to my Dev Patel portrait-turned-AMP, and even further back to my love of line over shape in basically every drawing/painting I’ve ever made. However, in this piece I started to see a turning point of sorts in terms of how deliberate they became, and how useful they are to the overall image.

Did I also tell you that I like pretty people?