Queen Frida - The Seven Luminaries

Four years ago, I started working on a series of designs reimagining iconic artists as superheroes (and even revisited my Frida design during @kommienezuspadt 's blockchain superhero design contest), but after a week or so, the original project fell through, leaving a myriad of unfinished sketches behind. Now, years later, I decided to, not only revisit the old sketches, but expand on the concept. After taking some time off from social media, I decided to work fully on this project, and come up with something fun. Stay tuned for over 30 characters, neat abilities, and their warped alliances.

PERSONALITY
From the get go I wanted Frida to be a sorceress—a hardcore witch. Something about her history with pain (physical and emotional) and her fascination with, and portrayal of, both life and death, made me think of her as the perfect source of magic. To me, she’s always embodied a juxtaposition of life and death, masculinity and femininity, sexuality and asexuality, brokenness and unity. A force to be reckoned with. I wanted to channel this tour-de-force and combustive personality, her raw power and intensity, and magic felt like the perfect choice: always unpredictable. Queen Frida is a survivor. She is part of the team but her own interests always come first. Like a slithering snake or a sneaky vine, she will get under your skin, seduce, manipulate, and threaten, until she gets what she wants. She’s both a beautiful flower and the deadliest of thorns.

AESTHETIC
Back when I was working on the original design, I did several versions where I pushed Frida’s masculinity out more. But at the end of the day, they didn’t feel right as designs, especially when magic still seemed to be the strongest choice to channel her raw personality. As I did more research, I noticed how much she loved to wear dresses, patterned shawls, and incredibly colorful flowers topping her braided hair. This seemed like the right way to go. In a way, I wanted her to resemble a combination of the Evil Queen from OG Snow White, and the Scarlet Witch from the comics. This is probably my least “superhero-ee” design, and there’s a reason for this (however, I do have a version where she has a cape, which I’ll share later), but for her specifically, this worked. I wanted to stay away from spandex and anything resembling an armor—however, the fabric of her dress is protected by magical runes, making it impenetrable to the average attack.

REDESIGN
I was very happy with my original Frida design from 2017 and it is, to the day, one of my favorite personal designs (which is RARE), but it just didn’t work for this new Animated Series/Disney-fied approach. I kept the roses, the skull earrings, and overall color palette, but I wanted her overall shape to be snaky, filled with curves, like a deceptive twisting road. The OG design suddenly felt too symmetrical and too stiff. I wanted to show more of her personality and less of a “pose”. I also decided on the huge necklace and the draping sleeves almost last minute, because it added some nice jagged peaks to her shape — the sleeves in her silhouette almost read like sharp bat-like wings.

NAME
I knew I didn’t want to change her name completely, but I did play around with other options, like: Lady Skull, Lady Death. At the end, Queen Frida felt like the perfect title for her.

POWERS/ABILITIES
Energy manipulation, waking nightmares, telekinesis. Can turn others’ fears and powers against them. Mastery of magic. Control over nature. Can inflict others with pain — as if their bones were breaking, all at once.

KEYWORDS
Combustive/tempestuous, magic, death, nightmares, nature, pain, flora & fauna. Skull.


OLD 2017 SKETCHES

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“The Seven Luminaries” is a fictitious team where iconic visual artists* are reimagined as Animated Series/RPG superheroes, supervillains and everything in-between, with inspirations drawn from comics, movies, anime, videogames, and shows across the ages.

Project was originally conceived in 2017.

*(for this specific project, I narrowed “artists” to those who create static [no moving pictures] works of art.)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely on purpose 😏