Porcelain

The Cold Ruins of a Once Great City

  

I have to draw more.

Nezra is a new d&d character I made up months ago for a new campaigne that started and soon died. Because she is only the second d&d character I've ever created, I grew attached to her, and wanted to complete a design of her.

My drawing ability is circling the drain at the moment. I really have to kick back into gear or I think I'm going to fall into a ditch and not be able to claw myself out of it. 

I have to draw more. Even if it's shit things like what today's DD looks like. It's something! I've been up and down with my depression but it's time I tried. At least, right now, I want to try.

So Nezra, originally when I created her she had an acid breath ability, so I figured she'd be like the black dragon you see in Baldur's Gate 2 - it's the first dragon to ever encounter in the Baldur's Gate games. That dragon left an impression on me, so with that dragon in mind (it has a name, cbf finding it. It's a stupidly dragon-ly name) so the colouration flowed from what colours I remember of that dragon onto Nezra. The sketch I used is something I have had in my sketchbook when I was planning her design. I wanted to draw a body base to act as a mannequin so I can design an outfit for her. 

For her body design I was thinking Wonder Woman, with muscles but retaining a powerful feminine vibe. I also want to incorporate plates and scales into her skin. Idk how that's going to work yet. Eh.

I want to get her head right, so if I revisit this picture I want to come up with variations for the head scales (this has given me grief in my sketch book) as well as change her colouration. Since her original design conception, at some point during the play of the d&d campaigne she was part of she switched her breath type to radiant, so I want her design to possibly reflect that - to either retain the acid dragon roots with holy accents, or to scrub the acid dragon roots from her appearance and just make her radiant. I dunno. I look forward to playing around with the ideas - so I SHOULD.

When I draw something, especially when I use a sketch I've scanned that needs fixing, I make variations of the one picture which result in multiple save files. Most of the time when I am about to "drastically" change the appearance of some aspect to a picture, I make a save png of the current progress before continuing - just incase I don't like the new direction I've taken and want to back track. 

But sometimes I don't save variations for everything I do, so tonight I decided to record myself as I draw to see what I look like. I'll edit the footage and upload it somewhere to laugh at later. This is something I've sort of wanted to do for a while to post on this blog. The way I colour and process of creating illustrations always changes for me. So I've meant to do this to document how the fuck I did something two years ago, or something.

Sigh. 

Upcoming experiment is to do colour something from greyscale to full colour. It's a technique I've watched only a few times, once by Zhu Zhu and another recently by Artgerm (Arthero), so I'd really like to try my hand at that sometime. It looks like a handy technique.

Video I started watching. Adding it for viewing reference later.

少年ナイフ

Felix - "Despite how fucked you feel, don't abandon your passions."