I don’t know how many people watch it, but there is an animated series called Avatar: The Las Airbender, that I’m quite fond of. I frequently spend way to much time thinking about tv shows, movies and books that I like, and Avatar is no exeption.

One of the things that I have frequently wondered about this show is “what would the characters look if they were actual people instead of cartoon”, so I decided to paint some of them as I imagine they would look like. This is the painting of Mai, a noble girl of the fire nation, who is kind of gothic and very blasé.

I wanted to be as faithful as possible to the character’s appearance and expression, but that created a few problems; On the show, her hair is very peculiar looking and perfectly combed and whenever I tried to make it more realistic it stopped resembling Mai, so I decided to keep it with the same proportions it has in the animated version. Also, her features are very sharp, so its tricky making her look feminine, with the right amount of softness among the stiffness typical of this character. But all in all, I’m pleased with the final result.

This was all done on Photoshop. I painted everything, with the exception of the pattern texture of her clothes (you know, the little flowery drawings) and some of the background textures; those I got from http://www.cgtextures.com/ .

If I still have time and patience, I might do a few other characters.

If anyone want to know what Mai looks like as a cartoon, here are some links:

http://s76.photobucket.com/albums/j32/eulana/?action=view&current=1.jpg
http://s76.photobucket.com/albums/j32/eulana/?action=view&current=2.jpg
http://s76.photobucket.com/albums/j32/eulana/?action=view&current=4.jpg
http://s76.photobucket.com/albums/j32/eulana/?action=view&current=3.jpg
http://dvdscreenshots.avatarspiritmedia.net/309/773.jpg
http://dvdscreenshots.avatarspiritmedia.net/203/164.jpg
http://dvdscreenshots.avatarspiritmedia.net/203/174.jpg
http://dvdscreenshots.avatarspiritmedia.net/203/666.jpg