Yasia Bladebiter, Tiefling Fighter/Ranger/Duelist/Neverwinter Nine
^ [Dated 11-5-10] | v [Dated 11-29-10]
So about a month back, being all hyped up about Dungeons & Dragons from Soulyst (see previous post; the campaign is since unfortunately deceased), I picked up Neverwinter Nights 2 (NWN2) along with the first of its two expansion packs. Much fun was had at the expense of a good handful of often-long nights, primarily spent playing as the character who is the subject of the subjects of this post.The portrait above I did similarly to those for Soulyst, using a pencil sketch as basis for easier-to-make-expressive calligraphic strokes using a tablet in Inkscape. I blocked in the shading with opaque color instead of transparent greyscale, though, which makes a slight difference perhaps.
But disposing of the lineart, once I realized I could do that with surprisingly little tweaking, makes much more of a difference, allowing for more dimensional pieces. I'm sure being able to do so more reliably, more expertly, would be a great next step for my art in this style. Or genre, rather, to think of cell shading sans lineart as a style unto itself - since focusing more on lineart seems a promising style as well. What might their relative merits be?
Practice is probably the best way to figure that out, and thus the figure on the left, done sans difficult-to-manipulate traditional media, straight on a blank digital canvas. Though I must credit the NWN2 Toolset (the included Duelist and Neverwinter Nine outfits especially) for the outfit design, which is so very much better than the stuff I'm liable to draw left to my own devices. Must work on that.
The colors, I did on a layer set to 50% opacity; the shading is actually the first and second draft of the figure, each faded to grey and left in a background layer. Still, the top layer of lineart was subject to plenty of tweaking in the process of refining hands, feet, and accuracy of outfit; the resizing handles offered by vectors are truly wonderful to have. And hopefully, I'm coming closer to having a good simplified-yet-recognizable style for faces whose heads happen to be on bodies.
End-of-May Update:
[Dated 4-8-11]
