While I was sitting in my room drawing portraits, I popped in Mitsuda's
"Creid" album--a beautiful, beautiful piece of work--and was inspired to
come up with a picture of Elly.
Elly, in essence, is the very manifestation of perfection in a woman: she
possesses beauty, power, intelligence, and is philanthropic at heart. One
line in particular stands out from the game whenever I call it to mind--the
one seen above, which is spoken by Krelian--and so I decided to include it,
even though I botched a number of features on her head (one of the eyes is
far too small and at the wrong angle, the nose could be a bit shorter, I was
far too indolent to fix the smears on the hair--you get the idea). But I
felt that it didn't serve to prick myself over errors all the time; practice
is, after all, what leads to better and more consistent pieces.
I kept the style of the face a little simplistic because I didn't want to
make the image too realistic--given the anime-styled look of the character
designs, I felt that it would be sacrilege to spoil Elly's original beauty
with the real world's conception of a beautiful woman. In addition, a
problem I encountered while working on this was deciding whether or not Elly
ever wore earrings in the game (take a close look at their design to see
what I think of the game's puerile stabs at religion)--it's been far too
long since I've actually picked it up to play. But, in my opinion,
earrings are the type of things that can multiply a woman's image twofold,
so I opted to make them as large and glitzy as possible.
Incidentally, this is the first piece of fanart I've ever submitted to a
website, and one of the first pieces of art that I've done after a
three-year drawing hiatus. I'm not particularly fond of fanart since it
doesn't grant a lot of freedom for self-expression, but if you like this,
please take the time to leave some feedback. If I see that anybody actually
cares enough about my work to want to see more of it, I'll probably look
into doing more elaborate portrayals of the more inspirational characters
that the videogame world has to offer.