I wanted to make an illustration of a lady warrior with a lot of pride and truly focus on her pose and character.
Inspiration
This piece was inspired by the outfits of the German mercenaries called Landsknecht that were prominent during the 15th century and forward. I wanted to make something bright and fun to contrast the pride that I wanted to convey through the pose and expressions.
Sketching
I didn’t need to make a thorough plan for this piece, as it only involved the character and halberd that she would hold. Because of this I jumped into sketching once I had found my inspiration. The image below shows the sketch with my undersketch in yellow. I tried focusing on bold shapes and attitude. The sketching took me around 40 minutes, including the time I spent searching for references.
Line art
I did the line art with a pencil brush as usual. It was a straight forward process, other than the fact that I changed the pants, because the asymetrical design did not look good with the precise line work. I spent two hours on the line art.
Color
I wanted to use complimentary colors for this image, and I finally settled on yellow and blue. While the reference material for this piece usually had gaudy and loud colors, I did not want to make a piece with bright blue and bright yellow. Because of this I chose to mute the yellow down to a creme so that they would work better together. I spent 2 hours and 40 minutes on the color and rendering.
This illustration took 5 hours and 20 minutes to complete, which was within my time limit of 6 hours. Below I will show the comparison between the flat coloring and final piece.
Until next time!
Leia Haglund Illustration 
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