Hello there,

So, this is my entry for , where any artist can create their own interpretation of 's omnipresent character, Pepper (and optionally, her friend Wanda), in hopes of being included in the Pepper Project art book (and snagging a free copy and some goodies, as well).

Looking through all of the submissions shown on the project's DA gallery, I kept seeing a lot of the same thing. It was either just some random pinup of Pepper, or it was a deviation with a pun on the word "pepper" (hot pepper, red pepper, Pepper Spray, Bell Pepper, Yellow Pepper, Green Pepper, Pepper Shaker, etc.). The best entries seem to be those that strayed away from this trend.

The gallery also lacks vector art, which I believe is my strong suit. So I just had to contribute.

And so was born, Pepper Nemesis.

Going into my sketch, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it. It wasn't until about 20 minutes before I had finished the actual piece that I decided she looked like one of those "Cruela (sp?) Deville" types of people. I guess in my own interpretation of Pepper, that's what just happened to make its way onto my digital canvas. And now that I think about it, a lot of my characters look like aristocratic villains.

Not that this is a bad thing, in my opinion. ;D

Anyway, I finished this last night (well, on the morning of the 12th, to be technical) after working on it for about 8 hours straight. I would have had it up for you last night, but my computer was having trouble rasterizing the image (vectors to pixels, basically). After about four tries and four restarts later, I gave up and decided to give it another go today.

And in the end, it took about two hours to rasterize. The people over at Imaginary Friends Studios wanted a very large image, preferably larger than the dimensions they had given as an indication to the page size. So I gave them larger. Much larger.

I'm pretty happy with it. I experimented with patterns a bit, which was fun. I really love her jacket, so don't be surprised if it shows up on one of my characters eventually. ^_^

Since the contest allows for as many entries as one would like, I'm probably going to do another one with a different theme altogether (hopefully more planned and collected this time). But if I'm smart, I'll wait until after Valentine's Day. I need to do a new ID for myself, and I'd like to do a Valentine's Day-themed piece.

Anyway, please FULL VIEW and enjoy!

Adobe Illustrator CS, about 8 hours of work.

Pepper (C) Artgerm.