River Tam Zombified is the next entry in my Firefly Undead project. It’s hard to take someone so incredibly pretty and turn them into a horrifying monster. River Tam, played by Summer Glau is extremely pretty. Almost a shame to turn her into a zombie. Unrealistic too as I imagine she would always be victorious in any confrontation with the living dead. How then would she ever become a zombie? Who knows? A wizard did it. You can see all the rest of the Firefly Undead entries here.

I usually draw zombies with glowing eyes as it’s become almost traditional with zombie makeup to do something jacked up to the iris’s of a zombie. That’s probably due to movies needing a way to show that a character has made that transition from living to undead. They don’t get to grow teeth like a vampire. And it’s a tad bit to early to show them rotting. So it’s easy to do something to the eyes. And that’s why River Tam zombified gets glowing yellow eyeballs.

Otherwise in movies it would just look like a character stopped moving for a bit and then went crazy. It would confuse people. We can’t have that. There needs to be some sort of punch to show that this thing is no longer human. It’s a monster.

Eyeballs. Zombies have weird eyeballs. Most of the time.

I like that, but it becomes a problem when I’m drawing somebody known for having dark brown eyes. You want a zombified sketch to look like the person, but you also want to show that they are inhuman. Summer Glau has really pretty brown eyes…. Sadly as a zombie they glow yellow. Call it artistic license.

Here’s the reference picture I used for River Tam zombified. You can tell me how close you think I got. I didn’t give her a lot of zombie wounds. Seemed like sacrilege.