Pew pew, motherfucker!
Oh my giddy aunt, don’t tell me someone let Dee out at the tablet again!
I’ve always liked this sketch of Random’s Miriah – drawn in March last year on a combination of Hot Fuzz and a bad Bollywood film — and have pretty much had it in the “to colour” pile since then. I got the urge today whilst procrastinating levelling Ulfrun to 75, so here we go.
This is a WiP shot, and I’m trying out a new way of digitally painting. Basically it’s the old “slap on the colour under the sketch” thing, but this time with a secondary layer over the top of that to give it a more refined, ‘painterly’ style. So far, only her face and hair have been given this treatment, so I’ve got a while to go, but my hand can only withstand a couple of hours of this a day (apparently I grip the stylus pretty bloody hard).
I’m… moderately happy with the pic. The guns were always kinda wonky, so I’ve handily obscured that with muzzle-flash (lulzsubtle). The thing that bugs me most, however, is her eyes. I really like them in the original sketch, but they’ve lost some of their sharpness in the painting and gone a bit… cartoony. I’ll come back and re-paint them later, see if I can’t get some of that severity back in.
Because, let’s face it, that’s my favourite part of Miriah; she’s an Action Chick, more eccentric than “sexy”, and muscular and lithe rather than a Buffy-style waif (she beats up demons as a normal human, after all). She’s the quintessential Geek Gone Bad; an age and a half ago, Random even wrote a short comic of her where she was pulled into an alternate universe… wearing dodgy Yuna cosplay (some of you may remember I wrote a similar story set in the Cornerverse). She’s also appeared as a Ghostbuster, The Punisher, a WEWY fashionista, Indiana Jones, The Doctor, a Green Lantern, an S.O.S. Brigade dancer and Batman (where she finally gets to give Loki what he’s had coming for a while), and alongside Superman, Batman, Doc Ock and Optimus Prime.
And, of course — as well as having her own series — Miriah is also Loki’s favourite foil in Urban Nordica; “Loriah” is the series’ official (mostly) non-canon OTP.
Miriah is good-hearted and compassionate, if somewhat impulsive. She gets things wrong and occasionally this means good people (hell, sometimes bad people) die, but she never gives up. She’s brave and witty, intelligent and a total spaz, a kick-ass action heroine and a total geek. She’s also Chinese-American, and that fact alone makes her pretty unique amongst Western girl-heroes, forget all the other stuff.
Or not, yanno, because, hey, you know what’s in the details.