~Andromeda~ In ancient Greek mythology, Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, the king and queen of Ethiopia. She was claimed to be so incredibly gorgeous that her mother gloated about her being even more beautiful than the Nereids (sea nymphs), which angered Poseidon. As punishment, Poseidon sent a sea monster, Cetus, to destroy their kingdom. To appease Poseidon, Andromeda was chained to a rock as a sacrifice to the monster (by her own parents), but ended up being rescued by the hero Perseus, who defeated Cetus and married her. As a pinup artist, I just had to portrait Andromeda since she was a classic symbol of female beauty. However, she is also the symbol for shallow and superficial beauty, who ended up being Perseus' trophy wife simply because she was pretty. The Greek myth makes that clear - if Andromeda were ugly, nobody would care for her and Cetus would have its meal. The proof that Perseus was shallow was that if he cared for anything beyond skin level beauty, he would have rescued Medusa instead of slaying her. She has suffered much greater injustice from Poseidon, then from Athena, and then finally from Perseus for the same crime - being an extremely beautiful woman (just like Andromeda). The difference was that Medusa was turned into a Gorgon monster, while Andromeda retained her beauty, which has literally saved her life and earned her a happy ending. In my version of the story, Medusa would have earned the right to be rescued much more than Andromeda because she was not a princess and suffered much greater injustice from multiple people and even Gods. The story tells the fate of an extremely gorgeous woman after she lost her beauty, which might match the reality of the real world. The Greek myth has no information of what Andromeda looked like, so I picked Disney's interpretation from their "Hercules" (1998) animated TV show, where Andromeda was misplaced in Hercules' story, when in reality she was the love interest of Perseus instead. It's even more curious how Disney has portrayed an Ethiopian princess as a redhead, which is quite a discrepancy. It's worth noting that it was common in ancient Greece to idealize Ethiopian women as the ultimate female beauty in literature, when in reality they knew little about them, and would depict them as Greek women in visual arts. It's a similar phenomenon as modern Anime culture has led the Western world to idealize Japanese women, as if they actually looked like the Anime characters from animation and manga. In a similar way, the ancient Greeks idealized Ethiopian women because they were from a mysterious distant land they knew little about. In the end, Perseus was like the popular Brazilian singer and composer, Vinicius de Moraes, co-creator of the famous song "Girl from Ipanema". He was known for stating that: "Ugly women, forgive me, but beauty is fundamental". To Perseus, once Medusa has lost her extreme beauty, she was as good as dead as far as he was concerned. Makes me wonder what would have happened to Andromeda if she had lost her beauty as well - food for thought, or food for Cetus? 3D pose and camera set in Poser, exported with my OpenPose plugin, rendered in Stable Diffusion, postwork in PaintShop. #female #sexy #pinup #beauty #Andromeda #Greek #Mythology #Disney #OpenPose #StableDiffusion