Jenit Zu portrait

Jenit Zu again, formerly of the cover to Headlights issue #69 - the first asari to be a nude centrefold in a human magazine.  (I assume that's excluding magazine specifically catering to xenophiles - let's face it, we're going to be perving on hot alien space women the moment we discover that there are hot alien space women (even now we make them up so we can...), but I suppose a 'regular' porn mag featuring an asari would be a 'first' worth noting.  I did this for Jenit's wiki article so there'd be an image other than her Headlights cover for her page, since the wiki is asari POV, and part of the point of Jenit is that her nude modelling, from the asari POV, is just something she did, not something that defines her.  She's a diplomat the rest of the time - I revised her backstory a bit, originally (just idly musing while I was first putting together the Headlights version) I thought maybe she got into diplomacy as a result of being a minor celebrity on Earth, but writing her page it seemed more interesting if that was her career already (she does trade negotiations mostly - a career highlight for her was that she helped convince some notable hold-out nation in the Terminus to use the Citadel Credit like everyone else), and she posed nude for the magazine while she was on holiday as a result of a chance meeting with the photographer, because why not?

As before she's based on Briana Banks, and I kept the same basic colours I'd used for her before, teal-ish on the face, darker on the scalp.  Samara is the base - I kept her 'jacket collar' as well, since it looked kind of cool, but edited out her forehead decorations - and as well as replicating the distinct colouring on her 'ears' ('aurals' is the asari name we use) I put the same colour on the edges of her scalp tendrils, and (barely visible) very thinly around her eyes.  The big feature is copying the 'tattoo' patterns from Benezia - present in the game but really difficult to make out due to poor lighting, but there's a concept sketch page of her floating around on google that shows the patterns clearly.  Don't know if the final intent with Nezzie was for them to be tattoos - in some lights they look more like darker patterned skin, like the darker patterns on some asari scalps - but nowadays I kind of imagine them as makeup (if it seems like it'd be tricky to do those precise lines, well, people put on complex makeup really well all the time - and maybe they've got a gizmo to simplify it in the future, so you put it on with no more effort than would be needed to comb your hair).  So far as what the patterns mean, perhaps (since Benezia wore them) among asari (or some asari cultures anyway) they'd be considered 'formal', like a fancy hairstyle for appearing on the red carpet at the Oscars - that seems plausible for a Matriarch and a career diplomat both.