Mileena

Mileena from Mortal Kombat. So MK is a game I played a lot with my cousins (my mother would NEVER buy me a game like that), but I remember loving it as a kid because I had SO MANY female characters to play. So I picked Mileena for a very specific reason. I went to art school for college, but my mom had me in art lessons since I was 12, so keep in mind I tend to take criticism very well. Years of art school will do that to you. But in my final year, I’m presenting my final project to a jury panel, it was a comic book. I wrote it, and I was drawing, inking, coloring, lettering, the whole shebang. Well in one of my earlier presentations, some professors in the jury questioned my design choices. Not my art per se, but my stylistic choices. They said that my characters were too pretty and that it didn’t match up with what they knew of my personal politics towards beauty standards and women and such. I took great offense to that because they didn’t critique my art, they questioned my choices and my personal politics. So I did this to prove a point. I can draw anything. I can do a cute girl flashing her yellow sunglasses, I can do an orange alien and I can do a warrior clone princess with a disfigured mouth and it will still look pretty because that’s my style and my choice and it’s valid.