Laura Kinney redesign pencils (temp)

I seem to have hit upon an interesting way of beefing up my photos of my pencils while I work around my scanner problem - shooting them on my lightbox so I can avoid all the irritating flash-based light-bounce and stuff, not to mention it's at a much more convenient height for me so I'm nice and stable so no more worry about motion-blurring.  Reckon I'm gonna shoot all of them like this now ...

My God ... how many times have I drawn X-23 now?  I'm like a total sucker for this character, I can't help it ... anyways, yeah, went to see X-Men: Apocalypse for the SECOND time on Monday, and then when I got I was in SUCH a big X-Men mood I decided to do some fanart.  And while I LOVE the new "origin story" take on Jean Grey, what I REALLY wanted to do was pay tribute to my personal favourite X-Man - Laura Kinney aka X-23 ... or, apparently, the new Wolverine, although I'm still not really sold on that idea.  Sure, in the comics Logan may now be dead, but that doesn't AUTOMATICALLY mean he needs to be replaced, and I've always considered Laura to be very much her own character, and very much deserving a chance to forge her own path out of the shadow of her sort-of-but-not-really father.  Just because she has the same powers and an adamantium skeleton doesn't mean she HAS TO BE the new Wolverine, does it?

Of course the main reason I got thinking about this was, of course ... yeah, all right, SPOILER ALERT!!  If you haven't seen Apocalypse yet then SERIOUSLY, stop reading and just go see it.  Okay?




Right ... for those who're still here (and hopefully have already seen it and know what I'm on about), it was that by-now-compulsory post-credits teaser "sting" at the end of the new X-Men movie, in which , in the aftermath of Logan's blood-spattered escape from the Weapon X facility, blood samples are retrieved by a representative from the mysterious Essex Corporation.  They are, of course, the shadowy big bads behind the creation of Weapon X clone Laura herself, which strongly suggests the possibility of my favourite mutant showing up in the new Wolverine movie, or perhaps a future non-disclosed X-Men spinoff (possibly the Gambit movie if it ever gets out of Development Hell?  There's a precedent - the two characters have a history in the comics, meaning there's potential source material to exploit).  Whatever happens there, the possibilities presented have got me SERIOUSLY excited ...

... so of course I HAD TO start drawing her.  This time I wanted to come up with a proper, finalized PERSONAL take on Laura, from which I will derive her look in future pinups and stuff.  Yeah ... anyways I started thinking about something riffing on the seriously cool "new"-look X-suits the characters wind up wearing (essentially armoured flight-suits pilfered from Weapon X), but I quickly came to the conclusion that, being essentially indestructible, she wouldn't bother with most of the armour but would instead go in for a much more stripped-down version.  After all, she doesn't need the armour plating, and she's all about speed and agility so she's gonna want to be streamlined and flexible.  Also I decided to get away from the hair-down look she seems to have picked up over the years - seriously, if you actually think about it there's NO WAY she's gonna go into battle with her hair loose and getting in the way all the time, OF COURSE she's gonna tie it back (a-la Jean Grey in Apocalypse).  For a little while I toyed with having her actually chop it all off, maybe go with a pixie cut or even the full-blown Ripley shave-cut like Negasonic Teenage Warhead in Deadpool, but ultimately decided I still LIKE her long hair, so I wanted to keep it the rest of the time.

Yeah ... I really am embarrassingly smitten, ain't I?

Anyways, yeah, this is how you're gonna be seeing me drawing her in future, or at least the basis of that.  Yup, now I'm on a roll with my artwork I just KNOW I'm gonna be drawing more of her in the future ...

X-23/Laura Kinney is property of Marvel.