POV: you are the young king of Ithaca and you finally see that Spartan princess you were so curious about
A woman with a stature fit for a goddess standing proud and tall amongst her valiant people, her long hair cascading down her back akin to ocean’s waves, her eyes as bright as the endless sky above, with gaze so clear and so perceptive giving a glimpse of undeniably sharp wit hiding behind the calm and gentle smile. She was ethereal. And she was most definitely too far of a shot for Odysseus to make, but as luck would have it, he has always been an excellent archer.
^This is from my Odypen one-shot that you can read over here on AO3
More about the drawing below the cut
I have two work modes: either a drawing process stretches over weeks and months, or I get 90% of it done in one night 🙃
Here's a version without the dreamy overlay and sparkles
I normally gravitate towards Mycenaean styles of clothing for these characters, but when I saw this dress I knew I had to draw Penelope wearing it, it was just too perfect (is this the colour of the wide dark sea they talk about?🤭). And then I also found this statue (this particular angle, unfortunately I can't find the original source of the image) and it all clicked together.
Here's also my old character design post where I mentioned some of the naiad features headcanons.
The idea, as I mentioned in the wip post, was for the dress to resemble swirling water (a reference to both Homer's wine-dark sea and Penelope's naiad heritage), but @prompted-wordsmith pointed out that it also resembled a tree trunk, quote "the cultivated olive to Odysseus' wild one", which was an absolutely excellent comparison that didn't even occur to me.
I think it would be fun to later try and redesign this dress in a Mycenaean style, because I really want to have this consistency in my own visual 'canon', plus I really like the way the jewelry here turned out, so I think I'll probably keep it as Penelope's princess set. The veil in the original reference is also very nice, for some reason I have always imagined Penelope's "glistening veil" in the Odyssey to be some shade of pink. Maybe it's the EPIC's colour coding that has to some extent rooted itself in my brain or maybe the veil was actually mentioned as being pink at some point, regardless, I really think this particular shade works great here. I would probably use a more desaturated colour for her Odyssey timeline version, but this bright one fits well for her younger years, in my opinion))
Anyways, it was nice to work with colour again after so long, but it was also quite daunting at the beginning of making this piece. Still, I'm incredibly satisfied with the results and I think this has helped me with figuring Penelope's colour palette a bit more. I have *attempted* to give her skin a barely noticeable blue-ish tint (again, because of her mother being a naiad for whom that colour would be a bit more pronounced), so that's also something to play around with more in the future✨
I also made an attempt at colouring the line art, since I've had some interest in exploring more different techniques and styles, so we'll see where that goes))
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