USA! USA! USA! US...Err..What Do You Mean She's From Canada?

Now that it’s finished, I’m finding that I like this picture a lot more than I thought I was going to while I was working on it.
Basically, I just didn’t think that it was going to work out very well, but I guess it did.
The picture, for those of you who don’t know, is of Erica Durance, the actress who plays Lois Lane on the TV series “Smallville.”
The role of Lois is one she seems to have been born to play, and her Lois is the best on-screen Lois I’ve ever seen. Of course, that could seem like faint praise (though it isn’t intended that way) considering that pretty much everyone else who ever played Lois has totally sucked. Margot Kidder? Not hot enough. Not even close to hot enough.
Teri Hatcher…well, if you’re of the opinion that she did a good job of playing Lois there is something fundamentally wrong with your brain and I’m afraid that I simply can’t continue having any discussion with you on the subject.
Dana Delany has done well as the voice Lois in her various animated appearances, but for live-action there’s no one who can compete with Erica.
I’m sure Kate Bosworth will do okay in the upcoming movie, but…well, let’s just not get me started on the subject of that movie.
In any case, this image of Erica as Lois, which is my first attempt at drawing her, is from a recent episode in which she went undercover as a stripper.
In fact, she went undercover as the Worst. Stripper. Ever.
Not only is her clunky, awkward dancing even more painful to watch than Elaine’s dancing on “Seinfeld,” but she only dances for one song, and remains fully-clothed, yet no one seemed to mind or to see this as out of the ordinary, as, apparently, at the exclusive men’s clubs in Metropolis which cater to the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, the exotic dancing doesn’t have to be especially exotic, and strippers aren’t required to actually strip.
Still, as you can see, she remained incredibly hot, despite her awkwardness and the fact that it was a TV show strip club which necessitated that she not actually strip.
You can make up your own lewd comments about raised flag poles or whatever, as I’m just not up to the task of thinking up any salacious double entendres right now.
What’s interesting is that she wears our flag so well, and yet, like Margot Kidder, to whom she is, as mentioned, superior in every way as Lois, Erica Durance is actually Canadian.
The producers of the show have been making use of her assets quite a bit lately (I’m not complaining at all). Early in the season there was an episode that featured multiple scenes of Erica in a dripping wet bikini.
It’s my intention to draw one of those scenes, but the screen captures I have, while in HD, are kind of fuzzy and would be difficult to work with. Still, I’ll see what I can do one of these days.
For the sheer hell of it, and because I thought that maybe some of you would be interested in seeing it, I decided to also include a copy of the picture at a much earlier stage in its progress:



I actually have quite a few pictures on my hard drive that have made it this far and no further. Why? Hair. I hate hair.
Sometimes I’ll get everything except the hair finished, and I’ll just stop, unwilling to even try to tackle the tangled mass of lines that lies ahead of me.
It’s occurred to me that I should consider drawing the hair first, but I don’t think I’d even manage to get a start on a picture if I tried that.
You can see that there are some changes I made from the original. For example, I changed the texture of the outfit, which seemed to be sort of rhinestone-studded or something. I also got rid of the junk that was stuck on her arm.
In any case, I thought you’d like seeing this little glimpse into my workspace.
My work week is nearly upon me, though I actually took Saturday off this weekend so that I can spend the day hanging out with Kathleen. We’ll be doing the sort of things that she would be doing with her girlfriends if she had any, but since she doesn’t, really, and Brian has less of a tolerance for things like crafts shopping than I do, I got drafted.
To burn off some of the vacation time that I can’t roll over to next year, I’ve also taken all of next weekend off, though I don’t have any actual plans for how I’m going to spend that time.
In any case, that’s going to do it for this entry.