Persephone Fan art

This was a work I decided to do in honor of one of my favorite webcomics "Lore Olympus" by Rachel Smythe.

The subject of this piece is the main character Persephone, the future Queen of the Underworld.

Firstly I decided what type of mood I wanted to present, which was a dark lonely world. I believe that matched very well with her beginning when she felt lonely, isolated, and unsure of herself. A concern of mine was also the pose so I also found some references.

I started with the line art in the sketch. Besides being the goddess of the underworld she is also the goddess of spring therefore, I wanted to portray that with lots of flowers and plants on her hair similar to the way Rachel does it in her webcomic. Using my own style for eyes and other facial features while maintaining her design as faithful as I could to the original.

I also made an ode to the original myth by giving her a pomegranate in her hand.

As for her clothes, my goal was to accentuate her sexuality as a goddess of fertility so I used as a reference the book " The Costume History" by Auguste Racinet as can be seen below.

Her toga was made more loosely around the chest, I really wanted the fabric to look light.

After the baseline art was made it was time to color. One of the biggest struggles I had was using the same color for hair and skin since I wanted a clear way to distinguish both, so I had to rely purely on the line art to accomplish that.

The background I wanted to remind the love interest of Persephone, Hades, whose colors are dark blue. I wanted her trying to enter his world.

I was afraid white would be too strong for the toga and would distract the attention from the main subject, so used a very light pink on her clothes.

Afterward, it was time to add the shadows and lights, deciding where the light source would be and what would be accentuated by it, and then it was time for the shadows cast by her body

Base Color

Dark Shadows

Base lights and shadow

As soon as the sketch was finished it was time to start vectoring for the final result, as always starting by the line art and moving to the coloring

Since the drawing still seemed a bit stale I used the blur effect to add some more "magical lights" to the arches and the light casted upon her, achieving the final result.