This illustration was done for the R3 Jam on TRDL’s R3 Forum. Artists can participate in any open jams by heading here. The subject this time: Frank Cho’s Liberty Meadows.

I always enjoyed Cho’s strip for his busty, curvy rendition of the girls of Liberty Meadows. I admit, the juxtaposition of these comic-style figures and the cartoon-strip characters with which they share the strip never caught on with me personally, but hey, he got a dual following, both cartoon strip readers AND comic fans that followed him to his work on mainstream books thereafter. What struck me, in all of the cool Liberty meadows covers, were the themes. In some ways, he did a pin-up nod on several of them the way I do in this TRDL Pin-Up Series set of pics, so I was inspired by that. I don’t know how I fell into the idea of making it a Slave Leia cosplay pic, but it was kind of a way to hit a few birds with a single stone. Plus, the idea of those little guys in big Stormtrooper helmets cracked me up. Then again, I’m under the weather, so a lot of things have that affect on me right now.

The pic above is the Third Rail Thrills variant. Most of my pin-ups get this treatment now as well, for the collection. Here’s the propaganda poster version, which is described in more detail int he progress notes below:

Please enjoy.

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Process Notes:

I started by looking at several of the Liberty Meadows collection covers, trying to get a sense of not only how those animal characters really looked, but the colors. His style on them is very gestural and abstract, in an accomplished cartoon flourish, but man. Hard to figure some of them out. Especially the duck.

I started on the Slave Leia business by looking at stills from Return of the Jedi. I have to admit, I like a Slave Leia as much as the next guy, but I haven’t been to many cons and haven’t apparently done the requisite sweaty Slave Leia ‘research’ because I only had a vague sense of the details. When I needed to verify a few assumptions (what’s going on in the hair buns, for example; what are the boots like, for another) I came across a site dedicated to… well… Slave Leia cosplay, and that was pretty convenient, because you can see how the pieces are comprised, even acknowledging many of them deviate from the film details. I discovered the boot ornamentation, the pattern on the bra, and the existence of the hair bun ornamentation this way.

Here’s the original pencils, again done while a certain bebe was either sleeping or refusing to sleep. You’ll note the face is a lot different here. The concept was to play up the real girl vs cartoon characters vibe from the strip, by trying to normalize the facial features a little more from my usual comic style. But I felt, as I inked, that they were too big on the face, and while some women have wonderful, big features, Brandy was never portrayed that way, so i knew that had to change, among other things…

Here’s the original scanned inks. I could see that I had a problem with her right arm and shoulder, being too close to the head, due to a jacked-up proportion issue. Sounds like a Photoshop solution in the making!

The inks, converted to line art for rendering. I would be doing the boots and some other details digitally, including the choke collar thing. I couldn’t yet decide how I wanted to handle that. I didn’t want her chained to anything, and the concept was a PSA for the National Forestry Service, since Brandy in the strip works on a reserve, so the chained/free thing needed to be in the text and implied in the pic as well, but how, not sure yet…

Here’s the boots, drawn in. I would discover as I looked into the costume refs that the boots were actually more pixie-ish in the front and had lots of gold ornament, so i decided to do that all digitally after coloring the piece.

Here the face has been modified, features smaller, little less eager. Also fixed the hand… which actually wouldn’t last long…

I did the multi-tone skin thing on this one. I know some artists like to blend the tones, but I like them cell-shade style, so here we are.

Here’s the corrected boots, with the doodads.

Corrected hair, with the thingies.

Nice hand! Unfortunately, when I cut and pasted and then modified the hell out of the right arm to make it proportionally correct, the hand was away from the head. But that gave me an idea: have her holding the collar and chain, like you would a piece of undesirable clothing. So that was the slave collar detail, and it played up the text nicely.

This one is kind of funny in that it’s a Liberty Meadows pic, but there’s a lot of Star Wars detail in there. Man, i HATE drawing Stormtrooper helmets.

In the Third Rail Thrills variant, I used a form of Aurebesh, a Star Wars written language. Love the supernet for such things…

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. Third Rail Thrills No. 54 – Wasp [And Ant-Man]
2. Third Rail Thrills 43 – Dr. Girlfriend Pin-Up
3. Third Rail Thrills 39 – Rainmaker Pin-Up