Caledon Spargan: Daggerheart RPG Character

It has been years (decades) since I've properly played an RPG. My friends and I all lament not rolling dice together, but getting our schedules to synch up, the distance we live apart, and the age old 'who'd going to run it?' have been hurdles we've not yet gotten past. But recently my friend Jesse Glenn got inspired to run a newer RPG from the folks at Critical Role called  Daggerheart. 

So-far our group (which happen to be the same friends I made into The Gilkey Warlocks) have gotten together to make our characters. Here is mine Caledon Spargan. And below I'll break down the character art for him.

The character is a Fungril (mushroom person) Ranger (specifically one who specializes with an animal companion). I struggled a bit to find the balance between humanoid and fungus in the face especially, and while searching mushroom types I found turkey tail mushrooms a great inspiration and used them to inform a beard as well as the feet of Caledon.

I drew his body on one sheet of copy paper, and then on a Huion lightpad, I placed another sheet of paper over that one to draw his clothing. The owl was drawn last and was done using reference of a great horned owl photo. The drawings were assembled in Photoshop and I added in a grappling hook (listed as my secondary weapon on my character sheet) with a photo and some quick digital rope drawing.

When I was happy with the layout drawing, I printed it out and taped it to the back of a sheet of Stathmore 300 series bristol. On my lightpad I was able to use the printout below as a guide while I inked on the surface of the bristol. I used a 0.7 nib Copic Multiliner SP pen for the whole thing.

There was a lot of little detail that I probably should have used a smaller nib for, but I wanted the challenge of using a light touch with the 0.7 on the face and lichen details on his clothes.

The other trick was to add just enough texture to each garment or his skin to make it a different material without overwhelming the piece and focusing the heavier handed ink to the feet.

I scanned the inked art into Photoshop and started the color flatting. This is just to separate the different parts of the drawing as different colors, a professional coloring-in-the-lines. To the left side I just used whatever fake colors I quickly selected to get the flats established. 

Then on the right you can see where I landed with my final base color choices. There were many variations in between (going with red/orange for the mushroom bits and green for the armor. Then back to green mushrooms with warmer brown leather...until I got to this blue and green combo I was pleased with. At this stage I also established color holds (areas where I want the inkwork to be a color other than black) for the mushroom spots on his skin and for the outlines of the armor lichen.

I got from the pencils to the end of the flatting stage after one sitting––it reminded me of back when I used to do Discovering Dragons, and it felt good. But I waited till the next day to render the final colors. I did so using the Dodge and Burn tools with a stock textured brush.

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 hope to draw the other two player's for this adventure: a Drakon (Dragon person) Seraph and a Halfling War Wizard.