Concept art – Mage

Hi everyone!

Some  friends of mine play Dungeons & Dragons occasionally and like to share their experience a lot. One of them asked me to create a sketch of his favourite character – mage Ksardas.

As you know in D&D each character has his or her own character sheet with statistics and scores, and “qwenta”. The word “qwenta” is originally derived from fantasy books by J. R. R. Tolkien and means “a song” in elven language. In role-playing games, like Dungeons & Dragons it basically means a life story of a character and  it’s usually used to make a character more alive and real.

This mage is one of the numerous  sons of a calif, somewhere near the end of the line of succession. At a very young age he started to study the fine arts of spell craft from the royal magician and was so damn good at it. Later he nearly got killed by his brother’s assassins, when the above mentioned brother decided to seize power in the country, and , subsequently, to get rid of all his siblings. Mage’s teacher sacrificed himself in order to save him. After that sad event the mage flew from the country and travelled incognito, earning his living as a mercenary.

To visualize his appearance, I tried to stick to the image given in the description: man of eastern type, with slightly weary features representing sleepless nights of adventuring, learning and perfecting his magic skills.  Somewhat strict, reserved and slightly arrogant.

This is the first sketch I showed to my friend. As you see there are three variants of mage’s face represented here, my friend liked the middle one best.

 

So I worked with his choice and developed mage’s face from three different points of view and later coloured it with my Wacom tablet.

The clothing, in my opinion, should fit the travelling lifestyle and represent the character’s “profession” and background , so to speak.  This a full body sketch, showing three variants of garment. This time a first image was chosen.

 

So, I came up with a raw hand-drawn sketch and scanned it.

After checking proportions and scale I coloured it using graphics editing program Adobe Photoshop.

Behold! Here is the final version of mage Ksardas.  (I’m glad to say my friend liked it a lot).

 

Creative Commons Licence
This work by Eugenia Sakharova is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.


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