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.