Evolution of Maria the Beast

2011. Not much to this first design. Basically she’s just an anthropomorphic wolf with horns. But in all honesty, it’s really a recolor of my 2011 She Wolf drawing. fav.me/d40zjkj All I did was change the color of her hair and fur, replaced her costume with a dress and cape, and gave her bison horns. I admit it was lazy, but it would lay the ground work for future redesigns.

2012. Now that I had a basic idea for what Maria would look like, I decided to improve on it and make her look more of a beast, instead of just a wolf with horns. So I removed the belt buckle and made her dress took all tattered and torn, gave her three fingers on each hand instead of four, messed up her hair a bit, added a hood to the cape, along with some wristbands, replaced her bison horns with goat horns, and incorporated traits of other animals into her physiology, such as fox, kangaroo, tiger, and goat.

2015. My friend RetroUniverseArt redesigned a bunch of his and his friends’ OCs the previous year, so I was inspired to redesign Maria, yet again… Even if I waited a few months afterward to do so. I tried to stay true to the previous design, though I changed a few things like removing her wrist bands, changed her hooded cape so that it could be tied on instead of buttoned, making her ears look more wolfish than fox, gave back her fourth finger on each hand, changing the color of her fur and stripes, adding more stripes to her arms and legs, removing all the extra hair from her arms, changed her kangaroo-ish legs to lion legs, changed her goat horns to ram horns, and added more equine features, such as her head and neck, giving her a mane instead of human hair, and replacing her fox tail with a horse’s tail.

2017. After re-watching the original film and having seen the recent live action remake, I had decided to once again rewrite my gender-bending Beauty and the Beast story from scratch, which meant redesigning Maria...again. Now, in all honesty, looking at Maria's current design, as well as any of her previous designs, I felt they didn't really appear beastly or intimidating enough. So, taking inspiration from Glen Keane's thinking, I decided to really make Maria look like a combination of different animal parts, much like the original beast. I decided to keep the ram horns, horse mane and tail, and the tiger stripes, but everything else needed changing. So, like the first design of Maria, I gave her the head of a wolf, because I felt wolves looked rather beautiful, yet intimidating at the same time. As for her arms and torso, the part designs looked a little too human, especially since they all had breasts. So for the new design, to make her appear more animalistic, I gave her the arms and body of a lion. The feet were the most difficult, since I really didn't know how I wanted to approach them. At first I wanted to do horse legs to match the tail, then I wanted to do bear legs, then goat, then even monkey legs. But finally, I decided to use wolf legs, as the Disney beast also had them. As for her clothing, the cape came directly off the Disney beast, with it no longer being purple and instead a dark shade of red, as well as the golden clasp that keeps it around her neck. Her dress is still green, but I was also inspired by the style of an actual 18th century dress, which actually makes her look more royal.

2019. With my art skills improving and when compared to the redesigns of my two other beast OC's, I decided to go ahead and give Maria one last makeover. For this redesign, I kept the dress and cape from the 2017 version, though I tried to make her look a little more reminiscent of the Disney Beast, yet I still didn't want it to look like a typical gender switch design. She still has a wolf's head and legs, though I based them more off the wolves from the Disney movie, along with replacing her horse's mane with a collie's neck fur to reflect the Disney Beast's lion's mane, as well as replacing her ram horns with those of a buffalo, and her horse tail with that of a wolf. Finally, while she still has the arms of a lion, I made them a little beefier and decided not to incorporate tiger stripes like I did with the three previous redesigns.

2020. While happy with the recent redesign, I thought it may have felt a little too reminiscent of the Disney Beast and was just missing something to make her feel more unique. So, rather than just redesigning her from scratch AGAIN, I just took the 2019 redesign and added the tiger stripes back to the arms, which honestly felt bare without them, along with removing her black bottom lip and flipping her tail to the opposite side.