One character that took me a while to settle on a design for Meridian Knights was Queen Meridian. It seemed obvious, though she is a somewhat bit player at this time, still. So, I finally sat down and drew her. There’s a pretty good reason this took so long — it took me a while to get a look down I was really content with. Turns out, designing a queen isn’t that easy.

I struggled with the initial design mostly because part of me really wanted to keep the eastern european vibe going, but when looking at tsarina and other eastern european royalty wear, I could not find anything particularly elegant. Texturing took care of that, though, and injecting a healthy dose of Queen Amidala in there helped a little, too. There were several more Asian inspired designs I really worked with (particularly Chinese ones), but nothing really stuck. So I ended up with this.
It did take a few tries too to get down the expression; regal, yet both aloof and kind. I also did this one in Clip Studio instead of Photoshop, but I’m happy I did. I still need to learn more of this software, and I’m liking it quite a bit.
The illustration is added to the Meridian Knights Character Gallery, as well, if you’d like to see a higher resolution version of it.