Gearing up for a new adventure

As I have previously mentioned, we have a new D&D adventure starting up soon; I am in the middle of creating a new character and am forming her picture in my head, so I can do a character drawing. For the past fortnight, I have been trawling though my old roleplaying folders.  Some I have not seen for over twenty years!  I had a vague memory of some character drawings that I had done for a role-playing tournament in 1988! These were shaded in pencil, as the tournament adventure book was photocopied in black and white... I am talking 1988 here; no computer scanning or cheap colour photocopies were available. It was all cut and past back then. Finally, I found them and, as an added bonus, I also found some old original drawings of mine that I did for Australian Realms (a now defunct Australian Role Playing magazine) that I did some articles and artwork for. Some of these I had thought were lost forever. Colour me happy!

One reason why I had gone searching was to satisfy my burning curiosity to see if I still had the drawings, or if they had been lost over the years, and because I wanted to revamp some of them for my Roleplaying series of t-shirts. Yes, I could (and will) draw some new characters but I wanted to use 'classic' drawings I had done, back in the days when we would (tabletop) roleplay for days on end... literally!! Ah, the days of youth!

Looking though the old drawings, I also found character sketch of a thief (or now more commonly known as a rogue, in D&D). This is one of my thief characters, from 1991. She had been a member of a (celtic-like) tribe. If I remember rightly, she may have been the character who kept telling the party that the newcomer was a doppleganger and should not be trusted. No one believed her... until it was too late. She was the only character of mine that ever died; she was killed by the doppleganger but she died knowing that she was right. When the rest of the party were eventually killed, they finally acknowledged that she had been correct about the doppleganger. Sigh.

Unfortunately, this was one of the drawings that I had shaded in pencil, making it a more difficult task for me to revamp it. Honestly, it would have been quicker if I had redrawn it! However, it would not have been the same drawing with the same atmosphere. On the upside, I got a lot of practice in using GIMP and learnt a new feature. 

I scanned the original drawing, tried to remove the pencil work with no luck. Finally, I decided to manually erase most of the shading before I coloured it. Some of the shading was left to give more texture to the drawing... and because I was getting exhausted erasing bits! I learnt a lot about colouring in layers, with this project.

Many people draw traditional thieves in black and browns only. My thieves were usually female and liked a bit of colour. Not too bright though. The colours still need to be able to blend in shadows when needed. 

Finally, the next t-shirt in the Roleplayer series:

#2 in the Rogue/ Thief is now available on Redbubble. 

Also available in prints.