5 hours
PSP7
+ my beloved tablet
And a couple run-throughs of the Phantom of the Opera xD

This is fanart for Matthew Reilly's first novel, "Contest". Because I loved that book to bits. Basically it's about a man with his four-year-old daughter who get locked up inside the New York State library with six other Contestants in the ultimate fight to the death between seven intelligent beings of the seven advanced systems, plus there's the "wild-card" monster called the Karanadon that wakes up from time to time to utterly destroy whatever comes across its path; human, alien, bookshelf and so on. The book is like two inches thick and yet all the events happen within the space of twenty-four hours... it's that jam-packed full of action. And it kinda makes me want to visit the NY state library if I'm ever in NY... but I live in Australia.

And Reese is my absolute favourite alien character in Contest - I dunno why, she just grew on me as the book went on. She's blind, but gets by with all the other senses, she's the ultimate tracker, and she actually bothered to follow the contest's rules and could hold her own despite the fact that so many others were playing dirty. And she... is female, however random that may be xD

So what if she is horribly sadistic and has a face like the cross-section of a lemon... I still <3 her and her design.

It was kinda hard to try and visualise what a "four-sided jaw" would look like... and it also looked wierd to use one's tail as a weapon (that's the spike-like thing hanging in front of her) because it looks odd to have a huge thick tail longer than one's body... but I think I did all right as far as anatomy goes xP

The background is an abstracty representation of the sub-level carpark... there's smears of blood in the background because there's been fighting down there before, and since three of the contestants are in human form (one human, two amorphic beings in the shape of a human), there ought to be a lot of pretty wet red stuff hanging around, eh. The lights in the ceiling are the dim flourescent lights. I wanted to draw the mess of pipes that hang from the roof, but it proved to be way too difficult so yah. CHARGE!

edit: sketched a full-body shot of Reese here: [link]