Tamrith – human paladin of the ancients (again)
As I am shockingly getting close to running out of D&D characters to depict (I only have around 20 of them), my thoughts turned to the campaigns I’m playing and contemplating what scenes from the game would make for good art if we had an army of fanartists like certain popular online games do. Sadly we are not blessed with actual artists who care about our game, so I’m the best we’ve got. But fortunately I find it enjoyable to think back through the various scenes that have been significant to my characters, and I can only try to do justice to some of them with my limited skills.
I was inspired to start with a more comical scene featuring my paladin, complete with an anime-esque style for the supporting characters. That was an interesting experiment, and posing is a whole lot easier when everything is in silhouette and you don’t have to care about matching up lines. I really like how the faces came out given the exaggerated style.
Putting Tamrith together was much more challenging, and a lot of that felt like the different elements just didn’t want to come together properly. I’d say the nuances of facial expression are an area where HeroMachine’s capabilities fall far short of what a traditional artist could do. If you want something beyond a fierce snarl or a goofy smile or maybe a smug smirk, you’re going to have a tough time. Or maybe I just need to study the minutiae of facial anatomy to know exactly what to do with the proportions and positioning of the different facial elements to create the expression I’m after. I did a bit of that with this shot, trying to replicate the actual beleaguered face I was making in character. I think it ended up okay, but dang did I spend a lot of time trying to get everything to not look derpy. The hair was also way more work than it needed to be for something that was just “Tam has her hair down.”
Anyway it’s done and I enjoy it and the goofy anime maids crack me up.
Our weary adventurers were given a post-battle respite in a swanky mansion owned by a new acquaintance, and while the cleric princess (who is actually a princess) enjoyed being luxuriously pampered in the next room, rough-and-tumble Tam endured being assaulted by the overzealous maids and their arsenal of bath-and-body implements. She did not find it an enjoyable experience, although the next morning she did admit to feeling “weirdly soft.”
