Two Drawings

One downside to the otherwise enjoyable experience of drawing lots of stuff for Tales of Knights and Nitwits is that it’s occupied all my time available for drawing. I’m still working on Crown of Blood, the final part of The Bloody Crown Trilogy, and wanted to draw a map for it. A little time off from the comic was therefore needed.

Here’s the map of Falshire, the north-west corner of Denland, where many things occur in the final part of the trilogy. It’s not perfect but I’m broadly happy with how it’s turned out. That said, I still need to assess how it will appear on a Kindle, which is the single most important question.

Ages ago I had guides to several Final Fantasy videogames. Due to lack of space, and also the rarity of me going back to replay them (I am a hoarder, still have games dating back to Sonic the Hedgehog), I got rid of them all some time ago. However, I did find a small (maybe an inch, half an inch, something like that) depiction of Vivi, from FFIX, in that game’s manual. Given the diminutive nature of the reference material, I’m quite pleased with how the drawing eventually turned out. The trousers could be better, but they’re somewhat tricky.

[There was something else I meant to add here but I have forgotten what it was. I am quite certain, however, that it was witty and insightful].

The next episode of Knights and Nitwits will hopefully be up next week.

Thaddeus

Some Art

As well as my many activities involving sitting in a chair, staring at a screen, I have a wildly different hobby of sitting in a chair, staring at a piece of paper. Not a great artist by any stretch, but I enjoy it, and I thought I’d have a crack at a few different types of drawing.

The process I use is to do a very faint pencil sketch, then go over with a darker pencil. Usually I put it through a BW filter to make it starker, although I chose to leave the first image just in pencil-and-paper form.

Some of these I previously posted on my Twitter account, MorrisF1.

Cat (and dog)

The cat mostly turned out well, although the legs are a little stumpy. It’s based on the guide in Mark Crilley’s Mastering Manga 3, which I can highly recommend. This was a lot easier than the more realistic dog tutorial in the same book, but, obviously, that took a lot longer, so swings and roundabouts. (Having mentioned it, I decided to add the dog as well).

Desert

This is based on a screenshot from the nocturnal desert region in Dragon Age: Inquisition. I wish I’d gone for a little more background detail, but am quite pleased with the sandy outline. So, not bad, but I should’ve added more stuff.

Triss

I was very much in two minds about including this. As I drew it, I liked this drawing of Triss Merigold from The Witcher 3 a lot. And then immediately afterwards I loathed it. Weirdly, I think the outline of the face (something I struggle with for ‘realistic’ faces quite a bit) looks ok, but the features just don’t seem to gel together.

France Map

Being into both history and fantasy, maps are an interesting thing to try and draw. Personally, I’m not fussed about them being included in books (details often get swallowed by the spine and the necessarily small size limits what you can show anyway) but as larger pictures I think they work well. Anyway, this is a pretty basic map. Coastline looks alright, not sure about the city symbols though. The larger collective forest in the south and the swamps in Brittany (NB I was just practising symbols, Brittany isn’t really a giant quagmire) turned out well, and were based on the WASD20 RPG map videos on Youtube. On the downside, this took quite a long time. Not as long as the reptile head with hundreds of scales, but quite a long time nevertheless.

Lion Crest

I was delighted with this. Based on William Marshal’s crest (deliberately low on detail beyond the outline), although I got the proportions a smidgen off and the paws/claws could be better, the basics worked very well. I was planning on doing another but mingling it with the style of the Lannister lion (from Game of Thrones) but then had a perhaps even more cunning plan for another lion. If that ends up working (I haven't started it yet) I'll put it up here and/or on Twitter.

Thaddeus