Here's Charlotte E. Yeager from Strike Witches. Also known by her nickname "Shirley", she's my favorite of the 501st Joint Fighter Wing. Why? She's modeled on a person I highly admire: Charles E. Yeager, or simply "Chuck". Even though I have mixed feelings about the anime, I thought the concept was fun enough to make a picture based on it!

With this piece, I decided to add Chuck Yeager's P-51D Mustang for extra fun, as well as Chuck himself. By adding the Mustang, you can see what Shirley's Striker Unit (the things on her legs) was based on. When painting her Striker Unit, I went with the designs used on the PVC figurine instead of the anime. I liked how the figure was closer to the paint-job on Chuck's P-51D. Additionally, I left out the propellers on the Mustang and replaced it by a modified witch's magic shield, haha. I also left out the magical propellers on Shirley's Striker Unit. The background pencil drawing of Chuck was based on a photograph from his autobiography Yeager: An Autobiography, by General Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos. For the Mustang's reference, I used my own model found here!

As for materials, I used my usual acrylics and watercolors, but this time I used far more acrylics to get better "depth" of shading and tones. I even slightly altered my linework, making the lines much thicker around the curves and folds than I usually do. As already mentioned, I used a simple HB 2 pencil for the background picture so I didn't get overly dark shading. I added some CG noise to make it look older, then changed the color tones. With the painted stuff, I slightly altered the colors and brightness with CG, then added a soft filter to ever so slightly outline Shirley and the Mustang. The magic shield is entirely drawn in CG. All in all, it was time consuming and fun to draw!