Introducing Venus.

For about the entire lifetime of this sites existence I've always wanted to make more original stuff for my site, I guess my writings constitute as original, and my site design is pretty original compared to others, but I wanted something more than that aswell. That was partly the motivation for why I redesigned my site so many times, As my site evolved and I grew as a person, I craved the feeling of being more, creative, I guess.

I've stumbled upon some sites that had their own mascots, characters, or even worlds, and I always thought It was very cute, It made me go "damn, I should do something like that for my site" but never really persued on accomplishing that cause I had no idea how to make art. Actually there was a "prototype" of a site mascot as you can see in one of my older posts, but It never got far.

After a while, I just ended up contacting maerk.xyz, since he had his own cool site mascot, Naomi, and is a cool person in general, you should check him out. Alot of back and forth emails about me asking about art tips and such, and other going ons in life, he was very helpful!

I was so fixated on creating my character and learning art, I just ignored updating my site for about a month. In my head I was thinking I'd want a few drawings of her to put on my site just to have, but maerk told me about how he wanted everything to be "perfect" when he initially unveiled Naomi, but only ended up having a few drawings finished, and he thought that was enough. He told me specifically
" Nobody is going to be disappointed that you only have mirrored drawings to show off. She's a brand new character, after all."

So yeah, I'm just biting the bullet and just posting my one finished drawing of her here, why not. Here's Venus.

It's weird finally being able to show her off, I'm fairly content with how she turned out, but there's already like 10 things I can pick out about this darwing I don't like! But others I've shown her off to think she's a cool design, so I'll shut myself up, and y'know, Rome wasn't built in a day. As my skills with art develop, so will Venus.

The Name

She's my site mascot, the mascot of madeinv.love, so her name had to start with a V.

I basically just looked up names that started with V and had a connection to Love, there was Valentine, but that felt generic, my girlfriend saw me doing this and went "Why not Venus? She's the goddess of Love, and Venus would also fit in with the planet thing you have going on with your site logo." I went "Yeah, but I'm sure I could come up with something better", and then I never did, so Venus It is. I've grown on the name quite alot, though in my head I've also been calling her VeVe aswell.

The Look

Her design is a culmination of ideas that have been churning in my brain for like, years. But my main design philosophy with Venus was to be really annoying with the hearts.

She had to have my site colors, so her fit mainly consists of hotpink and black, with a little bit of white, and her cowlick/ahoge is based off my sites logo, I thought I was clever as hell for that.

In terms of her clothing, I was inspired a bit by just magical girls as a whole, but also just fighting game designs too, and other design stuff I like, such as thick eyebrows, and showing off midriff.

I kept her top pretty simple, with only the giant heart zipper being very eyecatching. I also gave her a scarf with 2 loops(?) so it could create a heart shape.

The skirt Is really stupid but I comitted to it, 100% non functional as a skirt since you can completely see her underwear, but I just wanted to add another heart motif to her design and some more assymetricality. I also think thigh straps are fun.

I also had a WIP of Venus in more normal clothing, though I wasn't able to finish it in time, that would've been her "Normal" design while this would be more of her "Hero" outfit, but as far as being the mascot of this site, the Hero design would be her Normal design. There were alot of things I wanted to add to her design that I just "couldn't" whether it be because of my current art skills, or I had a hard time making it look good, or just didn't have the time for It. To mention the fighting game design again, I wanted to give her some kind of weapon, though I'm still thinking to myself what that weapon would be.

Inspiration

I had a bunch of characters in my reference sheet, though I tried not to actually copy anything from said designs, but rather I tried to integrate the essence of those characters into Venus. I was mainly inspired by

Honey Kisaragi

,

Heart Aino

,

Viewtiful Joe

, and somehow,

Sonic the Hedgehog

you know what sonic looks like, im sure

"""LORE"""

I didn't initially plan on giving Venus much of a story, in my head, she was just gonna be a character that for some reason, was the defender of my website. Though while I was designing her, my girlfriend egged me on about making an actual backstory and such, and then I ended up making up an incohesive document about her, other characters I've also been making up, and some kind of world for them to be in. Whether that stuff comes to fruition remains to be seen, but for now, Venus is simply madeinv.love's mascot and defender.

So my "plan" with her currently is to just keep drawing her, and sprinkle her around on the pages of my site, and maybe If I have the chops for It, I'll work on that aforementioned "world."

Thanks for reading if you've come this far, I appreciate it alot, this is kind of ironic of me to say given my previous post, but I did have thoughts of all this being """cringy""". But I know that I'm having fun, and like I said in that post, I should Enjoy what I Enjoy.

I'm very happy with Venus, and hopefully, you'll get to see the fullest version of herself soon.

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