Character Art for My Campaign

[arsheesh]

Hey Guys!

Well it's been a while and I've missed the Guild, so even though I don't have any new cartographic material to contribute, I wanted to share with you all my most recent project. By way of an introduction though, let me begin by saying that I have always loved to draw. I was drawing pictures almost before I could walk, and people used to joke that I was born with a pencil in my hand. But something happened shortly after highschool, I just sort of, well, stopped drawing. I don't know why really, I guess I just got caught up with other things in college. Well it's been over a decade and I am beginning to realize just how much I miss this aspect of my life. Moreover, I have always wanted to learn how to paint. In fact, ever since I discovered GIMP nearly a year ago the prospect of learning digital painting has been really appealing. Well, I finally stopped thinking about it and decided to just go ahead and take the plunge. I decided that I was going to paint some of the characters from my campaign.

I spent a couple of days checking out online tutorials on painting and digital painting and then took an old rough sketch of that I had made for a character named Mara (which was loosely based off of this picture of Summer Glau), scanned it into my computer and set to work on it with GIMP. I have uploaded the progression of the WIP below. As you can see, there is still a long way to go, but I feel like I've made allot of progress so far in just trying to learn some of the basics. Before I begun this project I had only ever worked in greyscale (aside from a few colored pencil drawings here and there) and I was intimidated by the prospect of blending colors. However taking on this project has been a real confidence booster for me. Moreover getting back into drawing (and now painting) has reawakened a part of me that I'd almost forgotten about. At any rate, I won't bore you all with my artistic euphoria, but I will be glad to here of any comments/constructive criticism that those painters and sketchers among the Guild might lend me. Thanks.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh