Soren: 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. I've posted art process for my character and Mike's character (see links at the bottom of the post)

For this post I'm sharing my drawing and the process of making the art for Nick Kowalcyk's character Soren.

Soren is a Drakona (Dragon person) Seraph who wields a divine sword for his dragon god Azhdaha. Nich gave a me a lot of free reign on the dragon design parts (he asked the horns not be too big or crazy) and focused more on his skin tone being muted earth colors (and an eye that has a pupil of flame that I couldn't show well enough in a drawing this size).
I looked at several references for poses of human knights from RPG artists before settling on drawing this readied stance I could add my dragon head drawing to. The horns, sword, and crossbow were images/3D assets I pasted in as shape holders to make life easier, and the same for painting in a quick tail shape.

The layout was printed out and taped to the back of a sheet of Stathmore 300 series bristol. On my Huion 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.

The texture of the mail armor was the daunting part, how do space that so it was more open in the lighter areas and more dense in the shadows. To offset those textures I wanted his other armor bits to reflect his mountain upbringing with warm quilted bits and fur lined bracers/shin guards.

I scanned the inked art into Photoshop and started the color process. This first step is just to separate the different parts of the drawing as different flat colors, a professional version of coloring-in-the-lines.

As I said, Nick asked that Soren's skin be muted warm earth tones, which gave me some room to do richer warm tones for his other clothing and a cool green/grey for the armor.

At this stage I also added in color holds (areas where I want the ink lines to be a color other than black) to Soren's pupil and dragon spots.

The final colors were rendered using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop with a stock brush that also adds a pebbling texture.

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 look forward to playing more with my old pals and I'm glad we have these images to help get us in the spirit of our characters and have a unified idea of the visualizations of this adventure we all make up together.

Below is a group shot I assembled of our characters together:

If you missed the process art posts for the other two characters here are links:

Caledon Spargan: http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2025/09/caledon-spargan-daggerheart-rpg.html

Winnifred Cloverdale: https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2025/12/winnifred-cloverdale-daggerheart-rpg.html