So, back in June I started this little project as just another one of those things you need to get over a bad-art-day. It served it’s purpose though it quickly turned into less of a “daily” and more of a “as-needed” strategy for me to get into the process and just start. I kept the rule set similar enough… I did generally not look back onto what I sketched before, but to determine when it was done I needed a new criteria… that ended up being: When the canvas is full.
What was important was that nothing needed to be anything… I just went with the flow. Still I really like some parts of this so… let’s get a little feature of those:
Tara and Gen during downtimeIs that a ruby dragon?Illya and Gen on watch or sthTHAT unicorn
The two features I knew I wanted for Mio when I started to think about visuals was: dark skinned and androgynous. And because I was especially unsure how I wanted that last one to turn out i started to look around for references online and found this piece by someone far more talented that I am:
That was the direction I wanted to go in so I started with a sketch in the same pose, heavily referencing and then working out some differences I wanted to have in there:
One of the first things I knew I wanted to change was the hair, mainly in the sense that I was looking for actual volume. That lead to the second change pretty much immidiately which was to make almost everything a little rounder, softer, pushed just slightly more to the feminine side of things. I looked around for some ideas for clothing then and ended on some gravity defying fantasy style poofy pants and a wrap top, which makes a nice modular clothing setup for a practically oriented character. Add some scars and voila…
Mio wears no armour and that is unlikely to change even though it would probably benefit them mechanically. After this first Design attempt I also ended up changing the nose shape into something a little more distinct, but for this one this is how things stayed when I moved on to colors:
Early color layout
Eventual color sheme
I found that what I fits had there was to close to the reference though and eventually landed on a result that I got when adding a certain opacity of multiply and burn layer of the same colour on top of it. And because I was chatting with people while drawing I also got tempted t give them a tattoo with a very cryptic meaning behind it. Lastly, it wasn’t yet official what kind of climate we would be starting in with these characters so I got thinking how I might get a warmer version of this outfit to work and ended up with a wool cloak that can double as a belt.
So this was Mio design iteration one… After that it was time to get this away from the reference and make it my own which is when this picture came to be:
It solidified some of the distinctions I wanted Mio to have and helped me to break loose from the similarities in general. I also have a prober character sheet for them planned out, but have so far not gotten around to tackling that.
In the wake of trying out some more ambitious things I had set my mind on doing one of those fancy Party composition pieces for my DnD Campaigns. As I was setting up the Composition Collage style with some stand in References I came to the conclusion that the 4-people + 1 pet Meridiem campaign looks a lot more managable than the 8-people + 4 pets Verden Campaign. So this one came to be, while the other is still waiting to be finished some more motivated day… or week… or month… we’ll see.
Here comes my favourite one so far: My Meridiem Character Kalashtar Druid/Bearbarian, Mio and their ever present spirit guide Otsu.
I am really happy how this one turned out and it is probably the one I have personally stared at the most. Thus I am aware of a lot of tiny little mistakes… like how there some shadow missing at the ear and how Otsu’s ear is missing entirely. But given that this is also the one that strayed furthest from any references I had on hand I am still very happy with how it turned out. It really has a strong narrative in there, keeping the calm mood that I want for this set, despite the bear just roaring in Mio’s face.
They have a dynamic and given the DnD nature of it I do not entirely know it myself, but for what I know, this picture portrays what I was going for quite well. The most fun about it was Mio’s hair though. That texture was something else to deal with but once I had found the way I wanted it to look it was just a joy to draw.
