09 - Full Moon

PRETTY SOLDIER SAILOR MOON © NAOKO TAKEUCHI


This is a lineart I submitted looking for critique and it cannot be used in any way.

Well, this is it: the last tribute in the SM arc of ‘Princesses’. This arc ends as it started, with Princess Serenity as the honouree (and this time with Sailor V as atrezzo).
The moon is a slight manipulation of ~fatimah-al-khaldi’s Moon. It was very, very, VERY difficult to put it there and make the effect of transparency with Paint because I had to alter my usual modus operandi (which is already hard), so please, PLEASE, let me know how it looks.

‘Full Moon’ was planned from the very beginning as the match of Moon Faces. There, Princess Serenity showed her three different faces: Usagi was the girl, Sailor Moon was the soldier and Princess Serenity was the ruler-to-be; here, the plan was to fuse these three faces using a mix of Princess Sailor Moon and Sailor Cosmos, idea that obviously changed. The message is the same, but I added Sailor V, the original character who was a Guest, and I designed the outfits myself.

And the message is that at the end of her story, Serenity is a woman, a warrior and a ruler (even better, she’s a Neo Queen O.o). But she’s also a leader, a wife and a mother, and she can manage everything and be the very best at every single thing – she’s what we call a superwoman, the role model of the real life Mary Sue.

Sailor V is there because this final version of the drawing was inspired by the mythological characters of Artemis and Callisto – here they would be Serenity and V, respectively. But instead of Callisto being rejected by Artemis for breaking her chastity vow, here we have V giving up her destined love in order to support Serenity’s.
Some believe that Callisto was actually part of Artemis’ original name and that a new character (Callisto) was made up from Artemisa Caliste (Artemis); that would also fit with the fact that ‘Sailor V’ settled the idea of ‘Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon’ but was developed after its sequel.

My references (besides my own body, previous works of mine and some ‘How To Draw Manga’ books) were:
Manga Female Leg Poses (*what-i-do-is-secret)
Multireference: Hands and Feet (*what-i-do-is-secret)
Feet Reference (*Kibbitzer)
body shapes by kei (*kinkei)

I’M LOOKING FORWARD FOR YOUR CRITIQUE AND YOUR CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK