Saints Row - Shaundi BJ

Here's an artwork I drew a week ago, then had doubts about and sat on for a few days. Even now, I'm not sure I'm happy. 

A variant of Shaundi from Saints Row 4 was the first pic I ever posted online, on Christmas 2013. The Saints Row series is a funny little one that's special to me, but I've never really had an opportunity to draw anything for it, I take these video game theme months as an excuse to do so, but always miss out. We had a brand new Saints Row game in 2022, and I failed to draw anything there too. And then a year after that release, the studio shut down, the future of the series was extinguished, and opportunities for relevance and search engine/rule34 optimisation along with it. 

I wanna draw all the Saints Row ladies, at least the ones we ended up with in the latter half of the series. Shaundi, in her high class form you see here, as well as her Eliza Dushku voiced hippie self. Ginger haired tech expert Kinzie Kensington, and Sasha Grey voiced Viola, all from the Third game, the one that got the most love from the studio. There's other ladies too, but Shaundi is one I want to do the most.

My Emporium pictures have been bathed in bright colours from the beginning, and while they're not to everyone's tastes I have a great deal of fun and success making them, usually. It became natural to paint scenes with vibrant hues and have the saturated skin of the subjects matching, maybe here Shaundi's skin tone just clashes? Something about this, and the few Saints pics I've done before, feel wrong, or off, like the colours don't match. I thought I got better with colours, but this feels amateurish?

I tried to level it out a little and it's better than it was, it now feels like Shaundi's somewhat existing in the scene. The shiny pants, which I thought I'd come to draw quite well as seen on some recent Captain Marvel pictures, were really hard to colour in here, I ended up having to snap some photos of my own spandex pants to get them looking right here. And that's not me teasing.

Maybe I'll turn the background's saturation down? You can see that in picture two. Cropping is slightly different but let me know if you think it works. Maybe I'll scratch the itch drawing some more of her. I have ten+ years to catch up on.