My Favorite Valentine

I've been playing a lot of Resident Evil lately.  Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 to be precise.  Ever since I first played Resident Evil 2 on the Nintendo 64, I was hooked on the series.  I had never played anything like it to that point in time.  I have many fond memories of running around the Raccoon Police Department and being hunted by Mr. X and of the numerous confrontations with constantly mutating William Birkin.  Resident Evil 2 was actually pretty short once you knew where to go and what to get.  It debuted a concept in the form of a relentless hunter that was much stronger than your regular enemies and able to pursue you at seemingly random times (though once you've played through the scenarios once, you'll know exactly when to expect Mr. X to show up).

The Mr. X concept was essentially ramped up and intensified to become Nemesis in Resident Evil 3.  Nemesis was much tougher, faster, and smarter than Mr. X in RE2.  Whereas Mr. X could only attack you at scripted points in the game, Nemesis could strike you almost anywhere in the game in addition to the regular scripted encounters.  There's only a few times in the game where you must fight Nemesis and don't have an option to escape.  The rest of the time you can choose to run rather than fight, but he will chase you until you take him down or you advance forward to certain parts of the game.  Though I still hold the Gamecube remake of the original Resident Evil to be the best game the series has ever produced to this point, Nemesis had its moments when it was pretty slick.  

The main protagonist of RE3 is Jill Valentine, one of the original characters from the first game.  Pretty much all of the Resident Evil ladies have developed their own fan bases in a way, but Jill still reigns supreme as the most popular of them second perhaps only to Claire Redfield of RE2.  Nevertheless, all the time spent playing RE3 lately inspired me to draw this pic on the right.  It's a simple concept of Jill posing in a very sexy manner with a silhouette of the Nemesis behind her serving as a semi-bodyguard as well as a convenient placer of tentacles.  For anyone wondering, the "X"s all over his silhouette are marks used to indicate sections that should be all black.  Sometimes artists will choose to shade those spots in pencil and sometimes they use the "X" mark to indicate to an inker what it should be colored in.

In an earlier post (this one as a matter of fact) I posted a sketch of Claire Redfield I was working on.  This was what the final colorized version ended up becoming.  Fans of the RE series will no doubt be able to recognize all the nods on the monitors behind her.