Pathfinder characters: the old guard.

In this post: the first generation of player characters from our long-running Pathfinder campaign – as opposed to the long-suffering NPCs they harassed.

 

 

 

Harr, our halfling rogue. Like most other halflings, he has a harmonica, a tendency to touch things that aren't his, and a burning drive to kill his own parents for selling him into slavery as a child.

 

Magda, my half-elf fighter. There's some stupid joke to be made about exclusively picking fights with half-elves, but I think I have enough self-dignity to avoid it.

Nîmor, our dwarven paladin/inquisitor. (No, that's not multiclassing, that's unfortunate choices during character creation followed by hasty retraining.) A solid man-of-all-combat despite his truly prolific nat 1s, with a habit of putting his foot directly into his mouth when confronted with religious diversity.

Woodicles, our elven wizard. The ostrich-feather sleeves were artistic license and sadly did not come into actual play.

An unfinished piece of us barge-poling through the summer.

 

And some good old post-apocalyptic versions of Nîmor and Woodicles.

Evolution of X.

Time for a trip down memory lane with the evolutions of various characters.

As a character in Caesura, Max has been kicking around for a good long while. She started life as a high school newspaper hound and has been aged up and down depending on the demands of the story, though her defining character trait remains that of "tough customer."

Dav is Max's partner in (solving) crime, the sweet-natured sunshine to her endless thunder. There's fewer examples for him, but still a great deal more than most other characters I draw.

Gabor, on the other hand, comes from an entirely different set of stories. In 2013 she was a talented but wholly human police detective; in 2015 I dusted her off and turned her into one of the demi-supernatural angel-fighting protagonists of Arch Angel. Quite a character arc, I suppose.

Pathfinder NPCs.

My friends and I play the tabletop RPG Pathfinder together. And if you know much about RPGs, or rather about the people who play them, then you know that a steady supply of NPCs is the only thing keeping the player characters from eating each other alive.

Here we have a tavern owner, a farmer, her son, and a blacksmith. Protip: being responsible for the party's artwork means you get to decide exactly how stupid everyone's hair is.

A town guard. The shield in the top-right isn't just decoration; our GM sat down and generated a bunch of heraldry for his noble families, so that we could theoretically track alliances wherever we travelled.

Florian, elven bard by day, serial skirt-chaser by night as well as day.

A wizard from the backstory of one of my characters.

Poor, poor Simon. After his father died on our watch, we had an uncharacteristic fit of responsibility and decided to adopt him into our adventuring party. Unfortunately, it turns out that your average traumatised 12-year-old doesn't take well to disarming traps and slaughtering goblins, so it was probably just as well when he disappeared with our pony one day.

Old characters.

When my brother and I were little, we had a shared universe of characters based on the dolls, toys and action figures that we owned. At some point I was gripped by the desire to revamp them, so I put pen to tablet and birthed some good old artistic self-indulgence.

If it looks like the Mario Bros., talks like the Mario Bros., and wears suits with a similar colour scheme to the constituent parties of the Mario Bros., then it was probably a shameless rip-off of the Mario Bros. (Hey, copyright don't mean a thing when you're six.)

I, too, am a fan of disrupting perfectly nice family pictures with my face.

Yellow suits are fashion-forward. You heard it here first, folks.

And finally: a beard for all of us to aspire to.

St Andrews map.

A rather long time ago I posted some map doodles of St Andrews, where I am currently studying. This is what eventually came of it.

This map of the town (and various Fun Things therein) was supposed to run in that year's Freshers Week issue of The Sinner, but at the last minute the editor decided it wasn't needed anymore. By then I'd burnt myself out trying to finish the whole thing in a week, so I put it aside, meaning to pick it up again when it no longer made me want to ugly cry tears of blood and fire. And then I put it off some more. And then I just plain forgot about it.

Some three years later, I think I've finally come to terms with the fact that it will never be finished. So onto the blog it goes!

Drawing icons is fun and wholesome. The shaving foam is a Raisin Monday thing which I could try to explain, but there aren't enough words in the English language to do the absurdity justice.

Our ruined cathedral is very picturesque, especially when tastefully accented by a red-gowned undergrad. History meets tradition meets technology, and Instagram rejoices.

It's a closely guarded secret that the stretch of North Sea near St Andrews is home to a cryptid known as the Half-Finished Swimmer. Legend has it that he stalks the waters near the pier, ready to snatch any hapless pier walkers who've forgotten their gowns.

St Salvator's Quadrangle and its chapel, AKA Sallies Quad and Sallies Chapel. When the sun comes out, the grass is swarmed by hipsters looking to max out their vitamin D and maybe get some reading done. Bloke in tutu is waiting for the Raisin Monday foam fight to start, shaving foam cans at the ready. And of course everyone is avoiding the PH.

St Mary's Quad, AKA best quad. Home of the Psychology and Divinity departments all year round and newly hatched ducklings in the spring, despite the best efforts of the resident cats.

Wouldn't be Scotland without someone wearing rainwear, would it?

And finally the Student Union, newly (well, newly at the time) done up in glass and steel. I went out clubbing recently for the first time in four years and ye gods does it wear you out. How do you whippersnappers pull this thing off multiple times a week?

Cheers, kiddos.

Macbeth graphic novel.

Seventeen months between this post and the last? Don't mind if I do.

Anyhow, have some poorly scanned bits and pieces of a Macbeth graphic novel that I drew at fifteen. The sense of visual pacing involved in making comics doesn't come naturally to me, so this was quite an ambitious choice for an English class assignment – though frankly, "let's go overboard with drawing stuff!" was more or less my go-to approach in that subject.

Interestingly, the visual motifs of witches, masks, and transforming into birds are still finding their way into my drawings and stories a good six years after I drew this. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I'm dead fond of this panel in particular, where Macbeth and Banquo's thoughts and fears churn restlessly behind their dialogue. Meanwhile Fleance doesn't have the slightest inkling of what's to come. Ah, to be young and clueless again.

Perspective is for chumps! Also: whose hand does that even belong to, it isn't attached to anyone, sigh

I would make some kind of joke about reading the fine print in prophecy, but I'm pretty sure I'm better than that.

Peace out, yo.

More Christmas cards.

Only four months late this time! Maybe next year I'll actually get them up before the spring equinox. I'd shoot for getting them ready before Christmas, but that's crazy talk, man.

So there's a lot fewer of them this time around but they're also a whole lot more colourful and elaborate. Quality > quantity, right?

I hand-lettered that! All of it! Although admittedly, my hand lettering basically reproduced a run-of-the-mill Irish-style font, so take that boast with a pinch of salt.

Photo by Klaus Stiefel, reference from this absolute gem of a video.

You'd be surprised how difficult it is to achieve visual randomness, especially with organic things like leafy vines.

Attack On Titan is wonderful and you should all go watch it! Pixel art is fun! Pixel art is great! Maybe if I repeat that often enough I'll trick myself into believing it!

Because adorable. Font turned out so well it multiplied into an entire alphabet, though sadly it's not a proper font (yet?).

Pencilwork.

Once upon a time I was proficient at drawing things in pencil. And by 'once upon a time' I mean 2013, which says something about my motivation to update this blog.

A birthday present for my dad

Plus faces! A mere seven months after I first hinted at their existence.

And sometimes you just want to draw half-otter ladies. The shading turned out well, as did the delicate furred look to her ottery bits (why does that sound worse than it is?), though there's a weird sort of charm to her bug eyes as well.

Miscellaneous things.

Guy with bat. I dig his shoes, mostly because it's very unusual for them to turn out well in my drawings.

I was once told that the key to good character design in videogames is to make every silhouette unique, which I thought was a good skill to practice. And then I ended up basing all of them on animals because hey, what can you do?

Doodles for a map of St Andrews which did eventually get made, but not 100% finished off. You'll be the first to know when it does (I hope nobody actually believes me anymore).