Winnifred Cloverdale: Daggerheart RPG Character

My RPG friends from childhood have reunited to roll some dice again. Jesse Glenn got inspired to run a newer RPG from the folks at Critical Role called  Daggerheart. We've had two sessions so-far, a character creation session and then the first part of the adventure. After we made characters I drew my character and posted about the art process here: http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2025/09/caledon-spargan-daggerheart-rpg.html

For this post I'm sharing my drawing and the process of making the art for Mike Davis' character Winnefred Cloverdale.

Mike's character is a halfling war wizard. Mike had done some quick doodles of her with a punk pixie haircut and a houndstooth scarf. I asked him about what other details I should incorporate. He told me about her hallowed axe, a leather strap armor skirt, and a pouch of cards she uses to cast her spells. 

Taking all of those bits into consideration I started drawing her on copy paper. It took a few drawings of her head/face before I was happy to merge them into another drawing or two of her body and gear, all assembled in Photoshop and tinted different colors to keep the drawing bits clear from one another. I warped a houndstooth pattern into the forms of her long scarf. 

The above layout was printed out and taped to the back of a sheet of 300 series Strathmore bristol. On my Huion lightpad I was able to see through the bristol surface down to the printout to use as a guide as I inked. The inks were done with Copic Multiliner SP pens (the 0.7 nib mainly).

Beyond the struggle I have with drawing/inking any human face the other challenge was the houndstooth pattern. I decided to isolate part of that pattern almost like a rune on Winnifred's hallowed axe. Most everything else was rather straightforward inking-wise.

When the inks were scanned into Photoshop I could start the coloring process. That first step is called 'flatting' and just about filling in the various areas with flat colors (no rendering, gradients, or textures). Mike told me Winnifred's hair was blonde and that he always loves green/olive incorporated into his character designs. 

At this stage I also established color holds, which are areas I want the inkwork to be a color other than black. They are on the houndstooth, here eyes, freckles, axe runes, and the smoking magic trail (though by the end I also did some on her eyebrows to soften them up a bit.

The last step was to do all the color rendering adding highlights, shadows, and textures to the base colors. This was done with Photoshops's dodge and burn tools.

Drawing your RPG character (as well as the other players in your party, if you happen to be the 'artist' of the group, is one of the real pleasures of playing an RPG and part that I certainly missed. I still have yet to share Nick's character: a Drakona (Dragon person) Seraph which I hope to share soon along with all of the characters together. 

Wind in the Willows Quartet gears up Illustration

My illustrated edition of Kenneth Grahame's classic Wind in the Willows published by IDW has been released in paperback (order here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/796673/the-wind-in-the-willows-with-illustrations-by-david-petersen-by-kenneth-grahame-david-petersen/)!

This book took me years to complete the illustrations for when it was first released, and I'm so pleased to have it back in print, so for this week's post I'm going to share the art process of one of the inked illustrations from the book: Gearing up.

"Rat, with an air of excitement and mystery, summoned them back into the parlour, stood each of them up alongside of his little heap, and proceeded to dress them up for the coming expedition. He was very earnest and thorough-going about it, and the affair took quite a long time. First, there was a belt to go round each animal, and then a sword to be stuck into each belt, and then a cutlass on the other side to balance it. Then a pair of pistols, a policeman's truncheon, several sets of handcuffs, some bandages and sticking-plaster, and a flask and a sandwich-case."

This is one of the main visuals that I always wanted to tackle when daydreaming about someday drawing an edition of Wind in the willows. Before this Rat has gone around making piles of weapons; pistols, swords, etc for each of his friends so they can storm Toad Hall and take it back from the weasels. It's also from one of the few chapters where all four of the main characters are together. Here you can see I've put all the drawings above together, edited in Toad's weapons, and color coded each character to make them easier to see apart from one another.

I inked the final black and white illustration on Strathmore 300 bristol by taping a printout of the above layout onto the back of it and placing it on a Huion light[ad where I could see through the bristol to use the layout as a guide. For pens I used Copic Multiliner SP pens (the 0.7 & 0.3 nibs).

The textures on each of the character's clothes is where most of my focus was so that there were different densities of grey and the illustration wasn't overly muddy with clarity of each character's body language.

My illustrated edition of Wind in the Willows is available NOW for purchase:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/796673/the-wind-in-the-willows-with-illustrations-by-david-petersen-by-kenneth-grahame-david-petersen/

The book has Grahame's original text, with over 70 illustrations by me as well as a new cover (blogpost about that art process: https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2025/09/wind-in-willows-2nd-edition-cover.html).

Lower Port Sumac Model Video

The model of Lower Port Sumac used for issue/chapter 2 of The Black Axe. It's made of print-&-assemble medieval village papermodels, basswood sticks, strips of bristol board, and a sheet of styrofoam.

In the video below, I talk about building it, what Mouse Guard city the house models were used for before this one, the real-life inspirations, and how building the model helped creatively imagine what kinds of merchants bought and sold in the sea-level port sumac.

Direct YouTube Link:

https://youtu.be/Zg6vTfvuuC8