Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
So we're still on our streak of posts where I share about art pieces I did for those in my chat who redeemed free art over on my Twitch channel! One of the perks of being Twitch affiliate is having customisable channel redemptions so anyone in chat can trigger different stuff using channel points! Since I'm an artist, I thought I'd reward my loyal viewers with free artwork at 150K channel points!
This request was redeemed by one of my moderators on Twitch, who goes by mel_on_cake, aka mel! She's one of the girls on my channel and my only female mod. I don't make a big deal out of this but we do bond over having do deal with girl stuff like periods, which I affectionately nicknamed the Bloody Baron to make the guys feel more comfortable and so we can curse at the Baron together.
Source: Fandom
Actually the whole idea behind the Bloody Baron is because it's a ghost in Harry Potter which I guess fits because of all the blood and the fact that he comes and goes and is invisible.
Anyway, Mel's idea for this request was to have my character and her character posing like the Ghostbusters but we defeat bloody barons instead, which I thought was brilliant! It made me laugh and it was a really creative idea that I couldn't wait to work on!
Her initial idea was something like the poster from the female Ghostbusters movie:
Source: wallpaperflare
So for my initial sketch I wanted to make the Bloody Baron cute like a Boo from Mario:
And then Mel suggested I add a menstrual cup on top and a tampon at the bottom of the Bloody Baron so I made it his hat and tail respectively:
But after that I got a wacky idea to make the period products as our "armour" instead, so we would have tampons as a lance with the string as the point and sanitary pads as shields since these products are used to combat the Bloody Baron!
So this was the revised sketch:
I asked Mel for a reference of her favourite outfit and she sent me a pic of a blue dress which I thought was really nice! For myself, I referenced an angry cat face from MapleStory because it's a little goofy looking but cute at the same time! And I also drew a calendar behind the Bloody Baron as a background just because, we girls gotta track when he arrives every month.
I drew Mel wearing the menstrual cup as a helmet of sorts and I have a bidet attached to a water tank on my back because they're really useful esp to cleanup the Bloody Baron. I think it also parallels the weapon the Ghostbusters actually use to suck up the ghosts and all.
Once the line art was done, time to colour! I tried to make our colours bright and colourful, with some blood splotches on the pad shields of course.
And of course I had to make the Bloody Baron look spooky and ghostly. He's supposed to be a bedsheet with blood stains on it since every girl can relate to leaking the bed whenever the Baron is visiting.
I also changed the perspective on the text to make it look more like a movie poster because I wanted some depth to it when I did the background.
For the background I wanted us to be on a road of sorts with the text on the ground and the Bloody Baron in the background just like in the Ghostbusters poster! Of course I made it a blood red colour with some glow to make it look like a lighted sign just like the poster too!
Overall, I think it came out great! I tried to make the perspective as accurate as I could, and I think our characters really stand out behind the imposing-looking Bloody Baron of course. I think the calendar in the stop sign is quite hidden but it didn't matter. All that matters was it was recognisable as being a reference to Ghostbusters but with some very obvious hints to it being about periods.
Oh and here's the timelapse:
While some guys might shun it and think it's embarrassing to talk about periods, it's just biology and another part of life for half the people on earth. So there's really nothing to be embarrassed about. And as guys who have mothers, sisters, girlfriends or wives, I think this is knowledge everyone should embrace. It'll definitely make guys more empathetic rather than ignorant and arrogant.
So the next time someone has the Bloody Baron visiting, maybe don't make insensitive jokes and try to be more understanding and helpful. Life is hard enough without him around.
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
