It is finally done. Or rather, its as done as it’s going to get. Here she is, the overly worked, but finally done in resplendid technicolor: Lady Branwen, Ultima Online – Great Lakes Shard, Woman of Roleplay. Originally set to be part of a calendar piece (in 2008), this piece is a testament to my unwavering devotion to procrastination. Well, perhaps it also speaks to my love of gaming which recently has tilted far more towards the single player RPG than the MMORPG — that is, Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 vs. World of Warcraft.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love me some WoW, but DA and ME2 are so very, very well done. I love the community driven, modular nature of DA on top of its grand epic tale. And ME2? I didn’t even play the first one, but then I realized, “Hey, this is freakin’ Bioware, why would I NOT play it?”. Me and shooters do not get along very well — my character usually ends up splattered against a wall and my stomach does somersaults the whole time I am playing. (That being said, I would love to finish Half Life 2, but I can only play for 15-20 min stretches at a time before the nausea takes over). But I digress. Suffice it to say I whipped through ME1, enjoyed it, then proceeded to lose all of my save games, so I wasn’t able to import my Commander Shepherd. Luckily I found a web site of saved games from ME1 plus a small game editor which allowed me to continue the fairly approximated  adventures of my Commander Harrison Shepherd. Anyway, ’nuff said.

So back to the drawing above. Boy, me and colors. . .meh.  But the old adage still rings true: practice makes perfect, or at least you’ll suck just a little bit less. Something like that. Branwen herself was a stab in the dark of trying to incorporate both an illustrative and painterly feel to a picture, much like Adam Hughes. Suffice it to say I am not even close, but I did learn a little more about how the photoshop brush system works, and I suppose that is something. I also “feathered my selections” more this time, which sounds vaguely dirty, but it really isn’t. You know, I’ll post a close-up of Branwen soon and critique it. That’ll show me.

Oh yes — I just received a copy of Y.S. Hassan’s “One Land, One King”, printed by Bedside Books, a fantasy novel for which I had the privilege to draw the world map. I am only into the second chapter, but so far I am loving it. Nice work, Hassan. Sorry about flaking out with the map compass.

Ok, that’s it for now. I’ll be sending over desktop sized artwork to Alec over at the calendar website so hopefully those will be appearing there soon. (I won’t even try and vow or swear how I’ll never let this much time go by again before another update. We all know how that turns out.) Back to the drawing board. . . .

An update, after a very long time away.

Ok, above is the inked version of the picture from the previous day. Branwen’s face is still a bit off, and the inking is not yet complete. Hmm. I need to figure out how to change her face to make it look more like her character.

After some input by the Kilted Policeman himself, here is a new take (or perhaps an old one once again) on Branwen for the Women of Roleplay piece.

Ok, I figure I might as well show you how I muddle through a typical one of these calendar pictures, given the fact that this piece here is very late in coming out.

Now, some of the pictures for the calendar were drawn and inked on one piece of paper, scanned in, then touched up on the computer. But about half of these calendar pieces are made up of several different scans. The Branwen and Alec poses were done on an 11×14 bristol board, vertically, while the background dancers were drawn on the same size paper, horizontally. I then brought our two main characters over into the dancer background, scaled them down a bit until they looked right, then roughly masked out the white surrounding them, allowing the background to show through more. Now, the background dancers are far from complete. A lot of changes will be made to the faces of the right two characters especially. Other background props will also likely be done in photoshop.  Sometimes, if I can’t get it just right with my wacom, then I’ll once more used pen and paper to drawn what I am after and scan it, too.

Ok, I have my work cut out for me. So I better get back to it.