Character Redesign : Bliss

By now a lot of you fans of the Powerpuff Girls may be aware that there is a fourth PowerPuff Girl featured in Cartoon Network's new special (and most probably appearing again in future content). This is the character 'Bliss', who let's be honest was created to get the show more ratings, so if you're against the show then yeah, just let it happen.

So here's an image of Bliss (not my own) as she appears in 'The Power Of Four'.

Now I'm not against there being more than three PowerPuffs, so long as only the original three stay as main characters. And I'm going to be honest, apart from reminding me of the Mary Sue concept (in terms of character rather than design), I don't really mind Bliss.

What I do hold against her with certainty however is her design. On her own the design looks rather flawed and (although hundreds have said it) reminds me of those many OCs you'll find, which isn't bad if you're just expressing yourself and developing your artistic talents, but from a business which owns the official characters, this you would not expect. I mean not to insult anyone's OCs but there are better looking ones than Bliss.

My biggest issues are her Turquoise hair, which I find to be a bit of an eye sore. Her 'uniformed' colour being lilac, which is just the same as the much loved 'Bunny'. Her legs are also incredibly long, making the design rather disproportionate, it's slightly painful to watch when she's in action.

Okay, enough critiquing the official design, I myself am not the best but I would like to take a shot at 'healing' the design of Bliss.

My first attempt stays fairly faithful to the real design, in the sense that she still has most of her PowerPuff Girl traits.

So here she is. I altered her proportions so that her limbs and torso would be stretched out more, and shortened her hair length to her knees. This fixes the visual appeal of the legs and allows Bliss to look more like the rest of her sisters. You'll notice I also reduced her hips to normal size, no particular reason, it just disturbed me a little. 

You may notice that Bliss' trousers are different... or are they? SPOILER ALERT! : Bliss has been wearing the same clothes since her birth, which means that for a good ten years probably she has grown within her clothes, so they should be looking rather small on her now. Both the dress and trousers therefore come short, something the official design attempted. Because her dress is shorter, we see the top of the trousers.

Her colour scheme was another task when it came to amending the design. I took a study of the colour schemes for Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. I noticed that excluding their skin, trousers and shoes, each sticks to two colours (or in Blossom's case, three). With that in mind, I set three colours as the maximum for Bliss, you'll notice her official design has four colours according to this study.

I kept the turquoise by applying it to the heart piece on her headband, as an accent colour it stands out nicely. I wanted to keep the hair colour natural so I reused the brown colour, using a darker shade for her hair and leaving a white streak. 

The uniform colour was stripped of it's purple and you can see I made a chart of colours that had been used by 'PowerPuffs', including non PowerPuffs who aspired to be one or was engineered to rival them. Given that already the entire spectrum is covered, there aren't many options left (some of which are shown on the chart). I resulted in choosing a bronze yellow, since it didn't clash so badly with Princess Morbuck's yellow and also stood out against the original PowerPuff Girls' colours.

With this new colour scheme, I think Bliss looks much better and more like she would if Craig McCracken himself has created her. If only this was the Bliss flying around with her sisters.

But I'm not done yet! Here's another redesign of which is truly faithful to the original series' style. You see, Bliss is a teenager and you've probably guessed it! I'm going to The City Of Clipsville!

There's not much that's new I can say about this one. The colour scheme is the same, though I stretched the clothing out as if Bliss had been given a new outfit upon her return. Based on the model of Teenage Blossom, I was able to build Bliss, simply having to apply the standard PowerPuff Girl uniform and then Bliss' hair, which still goes down to her knees but because of her new height, is much longer. Would it not have been fun to see Bliss appear like this? It would have at least made for a fairly decent easter egg.

So what do you think of this redesign? Or maybe you have attempted to redesign Bliss yourself, I'd be intrigued to know how it turned out. If there's anyone else you think I should try to redesign, let me know in the comments.