Future Mother Princess Mercury

This image was sketched, scanned, and colored on March 21, 2004. I just felt like drawing someone pregnant, because I had never done so before. I also haven't drawn in my more "realistic" style in a long time, so I thought I'd try combining the two ideas. I decided to do Princess Mercury after a lot of thought, probably because of my work on Dark Senshi recently. I referenced the pose from a maternity clothing catalog, and the dress is somewhat based on Mercury's princess dress. However, I wasn't looking at it when I drew it so I just kinda made it up as I went along.

I sketched this with a rather dull pencil, lol. Then I scanned it and used Paint Shop Pro 5.3 to color it (I am just so attached to that program, I keep using it even though I have Photoshop on the new computer, lol).

As usual, I'm not too happy with this. The feet looked fine in the sketch, but while coloring I messed up. I also made her eyes weird, and the hands were a big challenge because I'm a wimp when it comes to drawing hands and I try to usually hide them or make them in an easy position. Trying to draw them on a pregnant belly was really hard, and the sketch looked somewhat better than this colored version. I still think its kinda cool, though! I especially love the coloring on the ribbons.

I was in a big hurry with this picture and it only took me like an hour to two hours to finish. I know I could have done better with everything, especially the shading, but by then I was aggrevated at my computer for many crashes it had been having all day. Oh well!