Larissa's breasts are mysterious. I show the character portraits around, and everyone always chooses Larissa as a favorite, and I think it's because her breasts are nondescript. Go ahead and check the first picture again... gimme your "breast" guess. It's likely the viewer has his own idea of how big they are, since she has a huge leather jacket covering them. My friend liked the smaller breasted characters and pointed out Larissa as being one of them, surprisingly.
Larissa is a lead character, so she needs to appeal to both a new audience and the returning audience from AD2. Larissa's breast size is right between what AD2's character average breast size was, and what men generally statistically like.
So what size do all men prefer? Well, if you haven't heard me rant on this, I'll bring you (and myself) up to speed.
http://www.hongfire.com/forum/showthread.php/11915-Breast-size-poll
This poll shows a skewing towards B, C, and A (or flat). Note that this poll is on a website with hentai, and generally hentai content tends to be underaged girls.
http://www.misterpoll.com/polls/254407/results
This poll is for a general audience. C's and D's are preferred.
There's an obvious correlation between preferred female age and preferred breast size. If you like younger girls, you're going to want them smaller.There is a percentage of men attracted to underaged girls. This group should be factored out, since they are not the audience I am aiming to please, but this is a very large percentage of the hentai loving population. What is the percentage of men attracted to underage? We can't say. There are statistics of men that act on these impulses illegally, but no statistics of men who simply prefer them. If I had to guess, I'd say it's somewhere around 30%, but that's just me being prejudiced. If we factor out the lolicon lovers, I have a blind estimate that most men prefer breasts between D cups and E cups.
And of course everybody loves talking about breasts. I'll be unveiling some animation stuffs soon, and I am more excited for that.
I included some references I used for Larissa's breasts. I just wanted to be more transparent about what goes on behind the scenes. It's not a tracing. I definitely used it for direction on how I wanted Larissa's nipples to look like.
My stance on copying is this: It's good to trace if you're just starting out as an artist. When you start to pick up on things, it's still good to copy and absorb other art styles. I'll occasionally hand copy some art from my favorite artists, but I don't actually show anyone this art, because it would be plagiarizing and pointless. I do it simply for practice. There's an unwritten rule communicated between the artist and the viewer that his art is original. Yet artists hone their craft by studying real life figures. It's a blurry line; Even if you trapped an artist into a room and made him draw something, it would still be based on his past perceptions and memories. Every artist has to have their unique stance on this subject. Instead of putting it into words though (as if this blog post wasn't big enough), I just included the references so you can be the judge on where I stand on copying.
