Princess Camilla of Zart

At the tender age of one, Princess Camilla of Zart had a run-in with an enchanted cauldron of plenty, resulting in six duplicates. Since there was no way to tell which was the original, the king and queen kept and raised all of the girls. Each was assigned a color and a new name to reduce confusion, and in time the seven girls each developed radically different personalities. All was well and good until the issue of succession came into play...

I was commissioned by AC to design each of the girls based on her suggestions.  These girls went through NUMEROUS revisions as I struggled to strike the balance between individuality (hair styles, poses, accessories, expressions) and consistency (face shape, proportions, dimensions), on top of differences in interpretation with AC, and--of course--my learning curve. I also experimented with several different drawing styles and compositions before settling on what you see here.

Without further ado

Royal Princess Holly. Her color is red and her motif is holly berries and leaves, which I incorporated into her diadem.  AC first described her as being the most 'normal' of the girls, which I interpreted as being the classic demeanor of a princess and (in my mind) likely the favorite for the throne.  Because I wanted to focus on her demure, regal air, she often came across looking a lot older than her sisters in her multiple revisions, like she might have been their mother rather than one of the brood, especially since her diadem was originally a crown. Letting down her hair helped significantly.

Timid Princess Dawn.  Her color is orange and her motif is a sun-in-glory, which I incorporated into her pendant. Dawn became cripplingly shy after an unfortunate experience with an impatient tutor. I had the opposite problem with Dawn as opposed to Holly--she ended up looking too young.  Dawn went through the most revisions of all the girls, but they were worth it.  This is my favorite piece of the set.

Frail Princess Saffron.  Her color is gold and her motif is a crocus, which I incorporated into her veil.  Princess Saffron is an attention monger and a drama queen. She spends most of her life feigning illness so that she can shirk her duties and have constant pampering. The trade-off is that she actually IS quite weak and delicate since she's always slugging abed.  She was one of my favorites to draw, and I think her design was one of the first that I was inspired for.  Originally she just had a cluster of crocuses in her hair, but AC asked for something else so I tried this.  Nothing says drama like a veil.  I didn't expect gold lineart to look very good, but it turned out surprisingly well, methinks.

 Feisty Princess Ivy.  Her color is green and her motif is an ivy vine, which I incorporated into her tiara. In my interpretation, she's a bit of a thug, but she always means well.  She's Dawn's self-appointed guard dog and can frequently be found in scuffles with their bully of a sister, Sky. I envision her to be the type to sneak out of the castle in disguise so that she can get some action in the kingdom's street fights (which are illegal, of course, but Ivy's not about to rat out her source of entertainment.)  I had a lot of trouble getting Ivy's pose right.  Still not sure if I nailed the anatomy, but I'm satisfied. Ivy was another of the earliest I had figured out design-wise.

Ardent Princess Sky.  Her color is blue and her motif is a stylized cirrus cloud, which I incorporated into her headband. My understanding of her when she was first described to me was that she was very careworn and nurturing, but somewhere along the process of her development she did a face-heel-turn and became a stuck-up, parsimonious snip, and I had to change the drawing of her accordingly.  Sky was my favorite (at least in terms of art) until I finished Dawn.  I still find her one of the most aesthetically pleasing of the group. I want her headband.

Tough Princess Eve.  Eve's color is indigo and her motif is a crescent moon, which I incorporated into her earring.  She's the strong, silent type.  I like what I've seen of her interactions with Holly, as the two apparently work as a pair--Holly is the ambassador, and Eve is the tactician, general, and bodyguard. Eve and I? We tight. She gave me the least problems when it came to design and art.  Once I got the angle of her face figured out, drawing her was a walk in the park; not like her brat sisters, sheesh.  I should draw myself giving her bro-knuckles or something because she's so chill, f'reals.

Apathetic Princess Violet.  Her color is purple and her motif is a violet flower, which she is wearing as an accessory in her hair.  While Ivy might have been sneaking out of the castle for street-fights, Violet was sneaking out for street drugs.  I don't know how she managed to get away with being stoned all the time, but evidently her parents and servants either didn't care or couldn't see past their own noses.  The angle on this one was tricky.

Ebony the Rogue. Her color is black and her motif is a stylized ebony branch, which I incorporated into her tattoo. Rumors have been circulating of an 8th Princess Camilla, kidnapped by a bandit just after the Cauldron incident. Wild and ferocious, the ebony-dyed highway robber is said to be amassing a band of rogues to take over the kingdom and claim her right to the throne as the true and original Princess Camilla...

Ebony was actually an accidental creation of mine, born when my first pic of Eve looked a little too femme fatale.  I came up with her story on the spot as a playful suggestion, and with my permission, AC took it and ran with it.  Ebony's concept has since changed drastically; In AC's canon incarnation, Ebony is Violet's street-walking alter ego, which I alluded to with Ebony's purple bandana.  Alas, I'm still kind of attached to the idea of a rogue 8th Camilla.

In the process of making these princesses, I played with a number of styles and ideas.  First they started off as 3/4 sketches, then I decided I wanted to try my hand at art nouveau, then I got the crazy idea to make each look like a stained glass window, as evidenced by my earlier WIP.   Unfortunately, I could NOT, for the life of me, figure out how to render the glass in a way that was neither too complicated nor cheap-looking.  As I stared at Photoshop in frustration for about the millionth time last night, I thought of a tutorial I'd seen somewhere to give sketches a soft, glowing finish, and I experimented with it on the lineart for the girls.  I probably overdid it on the gaussian blur, but I really like the effect. Coloring the lineart of each of the girls afforded a convenient way to incorporate their assigned colors whilst making for an effect I find visually appealing, and it's definitely a style I'll play with again. Here are the girls without flat colors. 

And here's a dump of some of the versions I did that are worth showing:

I still like these.  These are the first versions of Dawn, Ivy, and the Eve-imposter that inspired the creation of Ebony.  I decided against doing shots like these of all the princesses because I was intimidated by the difficulty of getting all of their proportions to match and designing/drawing clothes for all of them.  I had a hard enough time with just their faces and accessories.

I thought about posting all of the versions I went through of Dawn, but I decided I don't want to relive that nightmare. *deletes them all* DX

Cassandra

 Full Size

This is the culmination of hundreds of hours of work spanning over three years.  It started as a commission and turned into a personal challenge as it went through several revisions to reflect my developing skill and new ideas.  The two most difficult aspects of this project were consistency (ensuring that every shot of the character looks like it's of the same person) and the layout. Also, anatomy mistakes are hard to hide when the character is wearing a skin suit! The basic character design is Annie Erlaine's, known to me as AC, but Cookie's design and the gun are my contributions. I actually included the gun because I desperately wanted more color to add visual interest, and a green glow felt like just the right thing.  I ended up running with that green glow to pull the character sheet together. My name for the gun was the Wyvern 814, but AC insisted on calling it the Cally and attributing the design to Annha Milton.  *facepalm* What is this, I don't even--AC YOU ARE SO GOOFY LIKE SERIOUSLY. 

All of the text was contributed by AC.

The body font is Consolas and the quote font is Estrangelo Edessa.

The tech brushes I used to create the sci-fi background are the work of z-design, used with permission: Z-design Tech brushes set v2

Whoot! It's finally done!

Stained - WIP

Color and comments on these pieces are forthcoming. These are 8 separate pieces, but I've paired them here for aesthetic and simplicity.

Royalty and Rogue

Tough and Timid

Feisty and Fragile

Ardor and Apathy

Writing to Life

Please click to view it in full! The preview is so blurry o.e

She is called the Butterfly; she is an original character and representation of one Aryn Chris. The style is an attempted emulation of Alphonse Mucha's "Art Nouveau." I experimented with many things while working on this piece (part of why it took so long) and completely went to to town on Photoshop's stroke effect, the stamp tool, gradients, opacity, and multiply settings. I also used stock resources to do the text on the book and butterflies and the texture for the frame:

Handwriting texture? by XlionheartX
Script Texture by CaptainRedd-Stock
old crackly parchment texture by Teeth-Man

I used a this spiffy Modern Mucha Dress-Up Game by Gasara to help me design the dress. I knew from AC's request that it was supposed to have three layers, but the horrible creation I came up with at first looked perfectly terrible. With the doll maker I constructed this dress to use as a reference and it helped tremendously.

 Edit: Incidentally some color changes were in order for want of contrast and balance. Changing the color on the stockings was actually a lot harder than it usually is for a photoshop piece...I still had a file with all of the separate layers but it required back-tracking through several adjustments and effects and touch ups which then had to be re-done before it looked like the finished product again. Then I fiddled with the background shades since the brown didn't look "striking" enough and came up with these two variations:

I like the one on the left; it reflects nicely the autumn-y mood I've been in this past week due to the cooler temperatures here in Florida, but ultimately it was deemed that the background/frame altogether didn't flow with the character, so after 3 hours of fighting with it in the wee hours of the morning AC asked for the frame to be discarded completely.

This is the final product! (also very blurry >.<)

Head Under Water, And You Tell Me to Breathe Easy For Awhile

As a preamble, this update was inspired due to several things...watching the movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire, going swimming at Typhoon Lagoon, a picture Evie drew of two of our characters as mer-folk, and discussing a story project featuring an aquatic race with my sister LC in the last few weeks before she left.  All of this water-themed fantasy stuff made me want to whip up a few new pieces in that vein, and I've also included a lot of old stuff from my hoarding drawer and dusty computer files that I've just been sitting on for awhile.
First, here's a very old pic of mine, which I might have drawn anywhere between 2005 to 2007.

This was concept art for LC for a story project about a person who is entrusted by a dying mermaid with the care of her baby. (You can tell how old this drawing is by how rumpled the paper looks x_x )

Fast forward to 2009, and you get this. (I didn't get around to signing it until I dug it out recently, that's why the date makes it look more recent than it actually is x_X).

This is one of my all-Photoshop pieces, and it took more hours than I care to remember to finish.  I drew it for a client on DeviantArt who paid me $100 for it, the only parameters being that he wanted her doing a back flip underwater, topless, and he didn't want her to look like Ariel. I edited in the shell bra for posting here, not because I'm necessarily opposed to nudity, but it just looked odd.  I sort of think all of it looks odd, frankly--not one of my favorite pieces.  I like the concept and I enjoyed the challenge of the dynamic pose, but I feel my execution is off.  Maybe I'll revisit this someday when my coloring skills and anatomy knowledge have improved.  Oh and I used three textures from DeviantArt to help make the background, so here are the credits:


"Texture 1 - Watery Snow" by Saekaeru
"texture 15" by Sirius-sdz
"Water" by rosalinestock

The sketches in this compilation range in age from summer 2010 to recent, 2011. (click to see closer!)

These are concept sketches for LC's aquatic-race story project tentatively titled Echelons.  I LOVE this story, and I'm so excited that she's let me contribute so much. :D  If I had to describe the plot I would say it's like The Count of Monte Cristo meets Atlantis: The Lost Empire.  The fancy-looking guy top-left is Lord Rhiiyel, the deranged theological powerhouse of the Zanaran society. His "antlers" is actually a headpiece made of coral.  LC wants him to look really glitzy and have fabulous hair.  The bald, one-eyed woman is Aeika, and I don't really know how to explain her role in the story >.> She's important though. I adapted this design of her from an avatar LC and I put together using TekTek.org's Dream Avatar Simulator to use as a springboard.  The next pic is one of my favorite scenes from the story because it's really tense and yet stupidly funny at the same time. The disheveled human man on the left is Kaeden, and the Zanaran man on the right is Audahn. I didn't design either of them, but I've helped LC figure out what she wants Audahn's face to look like, which I sketched below the scene on the left. Audahn is SRS BSNS. >/ The sassy-looking guy to his left is Terryne, and he's one of the characters I got to design from scratch. This sketch is also the newest, which I think you can tell. I've finally started drawing more detail into my character's mouths, yay! Lookee there, he actually appears to have teeth and a tongue instead of a gaping hole in his face.  Speaking of gaping holes in the face, the guy on the bottom of the page that looks like he's been through a meat grinder is Seph, another character design I got to direct. He's my favorite. He's Audahn's head manservant, so he's basically Batman's Alfred.  Like any good head manservant he's organized, sarcastic and fussy.  Oh yeah and he's also a vengeful murderous mastermind. 

Now onto some personal stuff...this is a compilation of concept sketches of an aquatic race for my story project. The bits in this also range from 2010 to recent 2011.

For my story project I wanted an aquatic race.  The natural staple for such a role in most fantasy stories is mermaids, but I also didn't want my folk limited to the sea.  And thus I came up with these, which I am calling Merrows. They have legs and a tail, which they can use to walk around on land, but they can also fuse them into one streamlined "traditional" tail for more effective swimming. This lends nicely to two of my preferences when it comes to drawing mermaid tails--I like them quite long, and I like them to have a distinctive knee join instead of just a coil of muscle and flesh. These were definitely inspired by the Zoras of The Legend of Zelda series, and originally I even considered making their hair look like fins as you can see from the figure on the right near the top.  I've since axed that idea in favor of hair, since I want to play with different styles and don't want them *too* much like the Zoras.  Merrows are more amphibious than they are fish-like.  They have scales scattered over their body, but mostly their skin is smooth and slick and predominately blue. They have dark scleras instead of white and their ears are pronged and frilled.  While most of these sketches would suggest as much, they actually don't run around in the nude.  I imagine them wearing wraps around their waists in a Polynesian, African, or Asian style so that they're comfortable whether they have legs or just the fin. The full figure on the top left is the newest sketch. And the turtle...? Evie should recognize him, I use him to fill up empty space on sketch pages. He's right at home with all of his mer-friends. XD

And last, one purely indulgent piece for me and Evie, drawn a month or two ago...

Vahaadi as a Mer. <3 His current-swept hair was fun to draw.  Originally I was going to deck him out with all of his usual jewelry and his waist sash, but I'm too pleased with the long, sleek lines to clutter him up.  Besides, he'd probably drown under the weight of all of his gold trinkets, mer or not! I made myself quite sore trying to do this pose in a mirror for reference, so while it is possible I must assume he is in motion, because that's not a pose anybody should hold for any amount of time.