HOME | DD

Description
Lady Ryanna - someone I came up with while I was inventing extra detail for the Consort page on my wiki. I decided 'Consort' is a title, not just Sha'ira specifically (she's called "the Consort" just because there's only a few of them in any given era, and she's the only one on the Citadel, or anywhere outside asari space), and Ryanna here is the only asari in history to have ever been a Consort Matriarch; normally Consorts are younger, and retire before becoming Matriarchs, but Ryanna became a Matriarch and then a Consort at the same time. She also became famous after the rachni attacked Thessia, pitching in to help the humanitarian (asaritarian?) effort personally and rallying the planet's shaken morale and just generally being the leader everyone needed (a bit of QE2 during the Second World War), and she was also a diplomat, scholar, athlete - her character ended up being a 'most respected/adored asari in history' national hero kind of thing.

Her image is a pretty direct combination of Benezia and Shohreh Aghdashloo, but I did a lot of mucking around with Nezzie's hood - partly to colour it up a bit (it's a shame she appears in such dreary lighting, her costume's dark anyway but that chamber on Noveria just makes it look very drab), and partly to make the headdress part of it look less evil. I had in mind some concept art of Benezia where her outfit is very silky and gauzy, and the hood is much more a hood, with these trailing bits at the front that you can imagine eventually evolved into her spiky crown thing - basically I just did that in reverse. Lots of copying and pasting chunks of the hood and crown and blurring their edges together to cover up the parts I didn't want - it's not my best work, but with the original image being so glumly coloured I think I did okay with what I had to work with. With her scalp covered there was nothing to do with Shohreh besides smudging away her eyebrows; I considered facial markings around the eyes, but decided to just go with the lips and chin and keep the rest simple. I kind of think that style of lipstick became popular because of Ryanna, so later asari (including Tevos, the most prominent example) wear it deliberately to evoke grace and dignity.

Normally with such a dark original image I'd go with a dark background, but I decided to try a very bright one, and fade the edges to see if I could make it look natural - not great, but not bad I think.

Description
Lady Ryanna - someone I came up with while I was inventing extra detail for the Consort page on my wiki. I decided 'Consort' is a title, not just Sha'ira specifically (she's called "the Consort" just because there's only a few of them in any given era, and she's the only one on the Citadel, or anywhere outside asari space), and Ryanna here is the only asari in history to have ever been a Consort Matriarch; normally Consorts are younger, and retire before becoming Matriarchs, but Ryanna became a Matriarch and then a Consort at the same time. She also became famous after the rachni attacked Thessia, pitching in to help the humanitarian (asaritarian?) effort personally and rallying the planet's shaken morale and just generally being the leader everyone needed (a bit of QE2 during the Second World War), and she was also a diplomat, scholar, athlete - her character ended up being a 'most respected/adored asari in history' national hero kind of thing.

Her image is a pretty direct combination of Benezia and Shohreh Aghdashloo, but I did a lot of mucking around with Nezzie's hood - partly to colour it up a bit (it's a shame she appears in such dreary lighting, her costume's dark anyway but that chamber on Noveria just makes it look very drab), and partly to make the headdress part of it look less evil. I had in mind some concept art of Benezia where her outfit is very silky and gauzy, and the hood is much more a hood, with these trailing bits at the front that you can imagine eventually evolved into her spiky crown thing - basically I just did that in reverse. Lots of copying and pasting chunks of the hood and crown and blurring their edges together to cover up the parts I didn't want - it's not my best work, but with the original image being so glumly coloured I think I did okay with what I had to work with. With her scalp covered there was nothing to do with Shohreh besides smudging away her eyebrows; I considered facial markings around the eyes, but decided to just go with the lips and chin and keep the rest simple. I kind of think that style of lipstick became popular because of Ryanna, so later asari (including Tevos, the most prominent example) wear it deliberately to evoke grace and dignity.

Normally with such a dark original image I'd go with a dark background, but I decided to try a very bright one, and fade the edges to see if I could make it look natural - not great, but not bad I think.