Druid's Scorn - Event Piece
Disclaimer – This page covers information about Lula. I will give a brief description of him here, but if you are interested in more, click HERE to read his info page!
Druid’s scorn is an event piece I drew for the Dungeons and Dragons campaign my druid, Lula, is a part of. At this stage or “arc” of the campaign, we were battling a large group of hyena-like creatures called Gnolls. And by large I mean genuinely a RIDICULOUS amount of Gnolls, we fought these things for at least eight sessions (at least 40 hours in total). When we finally got to the last battle, I (and by extension Lula) was completely TIRED OF SEEING THESE BASTARDS. In this campaign, Lula has something called The Staff of Entanglement, which is a staff that can conjure vines to hinder the movement of others. It usually can’t cause actual harm, but in this particular battle, the last remaining Gnoll, the captain of the advancement, was so low on HP that the Dungeon Keeper allowed The Rule of Cool to shine through, and Lula was able to shove the head of his staff into the mouth of the Gnoll, filling him to bursting with vines. Gory I know, but boy was it rewarding.
Visualization
The first concept of this project was originally just a one-off sketch I did in a youth group one day. It was the day fresh after everything had happened, and I was still riding the high of doing something so neat, so I decided to doodle. When it was done I realized that while the sketch definitely needed work, I really liked the idea of it. So when I got home I began working on the digital realization of the piece.
Progression
What became immediately apparent while beginning the sketch is that I needed more room. The sketch was compact and didn’t quite allow for the amount of detail I was looking for. After uploading a picture I took of the sketch to rely on as a reference, I shrank it down and began working on the secondary sketch – expanding the view, adding more thorough detail work, and fixing anatomy (a LOT of research went into the anatomy of a Gnoll).
After finishing the base layout and color, I moved on to the shading.
Finalization
Shading is the fun part; a breath of life for the piece. I got to mess around with a different kind of light source than I usually do thanks to the magic vines, and in turn the new light harshened my shadows. I added the firey lighting around his eye (see lula’s info page to understand why), and I am seriously happy with how that turned out as well.
This art piece is something very dear to me, as it was one of my first real attempts at situation art. Most of my work is within the character design itself, but this was a nice break from the norm to really push my creative flow.