Mellie Greenfield – halfling wild magic sorcerer
This image was thankfully much less involved and time-consuming than the previous one, although it did present the unique challenge of building a sheep. By this point I was fairly comfortable with finding and using whatever elements would result in what I was picturing in my head, and hey if something doesn’t look quite right just cover it up with an excessive amount of foliage. I didn’t really bother with shading beyond making her light staff glowy, but I think the cutesy cartoon girl look is fine for her.
Mellie is a teenaged farm girl going through magic puberty. From a young age she’s had weird magic stuff going on that nobody could really explain, although there might have been some truth to that family fable about Great-Great-Granpappy Japheth and his fling with a nymph. What was at first considered cute and funny soon became problematic, and when she was told to “just hold it in” and couldn’t, she developed an instinctive shame at her inability to control herself. She became functionally ostracized by her well-meaning but nervous community, and spent much of her time in the fields accompanied by her best friend, a sheep named Mabel.
When Mellie was 12, her parents took her to see the famous traveling wizard Ygaram the Magnificent. After the show, they waited for an autograph – but then took the opportunity to ask the wizard if he could “fix” their daughter. Able to size up the situation and feeling sympathetic toward the girl, he instead became her mentor for an afternoon and taught her to cast her first actual spells. Inspired by this encouragement, she did the best she could to learn about magic and held out hope that she might one day be able to actually use her magic constructively.
Eventually, at their wits’ end after years of dealing with her disruptive magic, Mellie’s parents decided it would be a great idea for her to go apprentice herself to Ygaram the Magnificent. They sent her out with the fan mail address on his show playbill and an escort from a cousin who ended up ditching her after being zapped by lightning. Still not quite sure where to find the wizard or whether he’d even be interested in having her as an apprentice, she ended up falling in with a group of adventurers and is currently enjoying having actual friends and doing what she can to help stop a mean ol’ dragon cult that wants to do bad things.
