Natalya's character is finally complete! Her butterfly sleeve wound up being way bigger than I thought when I actually put it on her arm, but the fact that it goes past her elbow up to her bicep has grown on me lol. It might just be me, but I find that the black from her sleeve and from the XII on her right pops out a little too much from her skin; almost feels like I didn't blend them enough. I know straight black does pop from real skin too, but real tattoos seem to just blend with the fleshy tones naturally for some reason. I'll have to ask my critic/editor/whatever I should call her lol. Overall I'm happy with how she turned out, and I had alot of fun playing with the blue tones in her top and the bubble-gum pink dye at the tips of her hair. At first I thought the pink might be too strong, but I find it growing on me too lol.

Now, I did say I would cover the rest of her back story, so here it goes! All of this happens in her home country who's name I haven't come up with yet lol. As the years go by, her jobs for the mob become more and more gruesome, and she gets involved in increasingly heavier things (drug dealing/trafficking, human trafficking, murders, etc). There was one group of houses that Natalya's group actually raided and torched, since one of the dealers that lived there wasn't paying up and kept the cash for themselves. In one of the homes, Natalya found rough drawings of butterflies in a little girl's room; she took them and had a tattoo made from them to remind herself of all the lives she had ruined. After that incident, she started questioning her lifestyle, and began to wonder if this is what she really wanted from life. What really turned her away from the mob was when they started recruiting more members from orphanages, and whoever they didn't recruit they'd sell off in the trafficking business. After her first orphanage job, she realized that she didn't want to create more people like herself; orphans with nothing suddenly enjoying a life of glamor through other's suffering, and being taught that the homeland's government are a bunch of rich folk who do nothing for the less fortunate.

That night, Natalya didn't report back to the mob family head, and instead ran away. They caught onto this, cornered her, questioned her, shot her twice the chest and left her for dead on the curb (if you look closely, you can see a scar from the gunshots near her left shoulder). Liza's mother had founded a giant center with a school for troubled kids not far from where Natalya had been shot, and wound's up finding her. They put her in the hospital to recover, but Natalya only catches a glimpse of Liza and her mother when she wakes up. When she recovers, she enrolls in said school for troubled kids to finish her high school (the mob put their members in schools they owned to educate them oddly enough). Liza's mother (who's actually a Duchess in their home country) notices how Natalya changes as she finishes her courses, often breaking up fights and tutoring some of the other kids. The Duchess offers Natalya a job as security detail for her family, but fails to mention right away that she'd actually be Liza's bodyguard. A bit confused when she meets Liza, she decided to go along with it since she begins to realize that the Duchess and Liza are the ones she saw when she woke up in the hospital. Liza (who is 11 at the time) sees Natalya sparring with the other security people one day, and actually asks Natalya to train her; figuring self defense would be a good idea, Natalya agrees. As she trains Liza, she notices that Liza treats her like anyone else, and isn't like the snotty rich people she'd always been told about by the mob. As she settles into her life, Natalya starts developing an enormous sense of respect and admiration for Liza, and they become very good friends despite their professional relationship and age difference.
Natalya never really spoke about her past, and at first I was going to make Liza oblivious to it. But I decided they would bond better if she did, so Liza slowly chips away at Natalya's shell to learn the truth. It also makes it much easier for me to show that Natalya has slight trust issues, and doesn't get along with people right away; she has to get to know them first. She also hides her tattoos from everyone except Liza, since they speak volumes about her past; I'll also use that for comedy relief in the mandatory beach chapter(s). That being said, she's initially pretty cold to the rest of the cast at first, but eventually warms up to most of them. Liza also balls her eyes out the first time she hears Natalya's past, and actually convinces her parents to legally adopt her into the family on her 22nd birthday (Liza would have been 15), despite it being kind of pointless at that age. I decided to really flesh out Natalya's character because some of Liza's character development will be about how lonely isolated she feels, being part of a royal family and an only child. Natalya is there to help her cope with that, and its a theme I wanted to explore to show Liza's softer side; she's not just a schemer teasing Ken for her own enjoyment lol.

I'll be using Natalya alot for some costume designs I normally wouldn't draw; she's going to have alot of punk themed stuff with darker colours, and I'll be able to mess around with alot of action scenes with her too. Her design has really grown on me, and she went from a minor support character to a fairly important one lol.