Sharing an original character of mine
So, here's a neat one. Back in September, when I was still teaching myself to draw, I had an idea while I was at my night job for a Conan-esque barbarian character in a mid-to-low fantasy world of anthro animal characters, kinda like Small Saga or Redwall. For some reason, the idea of a muscular barbarian woman who was also a rabbit -- one of nature's least threatening prey animals -- was just so funny to me at the time that I just had to draw her. She went through multiple iterations since then, but her final design as I had conceived of her looked like this:
That drawing was finished beginning of September. It's unsigned because I used a lot of reference photos and a little bit of tracing to put it together. That, and my line work was pretty shoddy at the time, and I was still using the spray paint tool to approximate shading. But it's been several months since then, and I've been making some improvements in my growing skill (such as it is), that I wanted to try redoing this design drawing from scratch, using only the old drawing as a reference. With that, I bring you "Mev," the first character from a collection of character pieces I tentatively called my "Barbarian Bunny" collection (I think when I came up with that title I was imagining a concept for a comic or maybe a game or something? I didn't really put much thought into the setting beyond a handful of characters and a title though). Peep this final design I just finished about an hour ago:
There's a handful of inspirations that went into her look. The axe and front skirt are Kratos from the Norse-era God of War games. The shape of the head is similar to Zootopia's Judy Hopps. The pauldron on the left shoulder and the blue body suit are inspired by Final Fantasy VII's cloud strife (as is the pose here where her weapon is on her shoulder--it's the same pose Cloud has in all his classic concept art), and the facial expression along with the bandolier of throwing knives is meant to be reminiscent of Guts from Berserk.
I'm pretty proud of this one, as you can see!
And just for fun, let me show you some drawings I made of Mev back in September/October when I was first putting my BB collection together and I was also still brand-spankin'-new to the whole digital art thing:
This here is Morrigan, the owl that raised Mev since she was a child. The owl wasn't a pure sketch, but rather me tracing the outline and face of a photo of a barn owl resting on a fence post I came across randomly a while back, with the finer line details and coloring I did myself. I was still in my phase of experimenting with paint and blending tools for the background (I had thought they were just the coolest little things on the UI and I had a ball playing with them).
Here's Mev facing down a fox. I kind of had this idea in my head of predator animals being like dangerous mythological creatures to the anthropomorphic prey animals in this fantasy world, akin to how our knights and fantasy authors think of creatures like dragons (that's also why Morrigan appears so much larger than life in her picture. I got the idea from playing Small Saga, and seeing how the cat mini-boss was rendered in the early game after the prologue, and I just thought that the image was the coolest thing ever. This one was just the outline of a fox (another wildlife photo), but I kept the finer details of his body deliberately vague, while using the spray paint tool over the foreground to sort of shroud his body in darkness and give his eyes a bit of a glowing effect. I think if I ever followed through on making a comic book or strip or writing a story for a game, this fox would be like a first boss encounter or like a first issue antagonist, to kind of set up the threats that exist in Mev's world. The leather and metal pauldrons and the bandolier strap are backwards, here. I didn't notice the accident until much later. This picture is also where I first gave Mev her two green and red beads hanging off the back of her ears, which wasn't present in the initial version of her final design, but which I made sure to include in the redraw.
Finally, the last picture I drew before I decided to redraw Mev's final character design this week: it's just Mev chilling a campfire while contemplating a rabbit skull and thinking about mortality. It's very "Alas, poor Yorick!" Notice that her hands are backwards (thumbs on the wrong side). Body shape and proportions are something I was having trouble pinning down at the time (I'm better at it now, but there's still always room for improvement). I also put a bit more effort into the landscape back and foreground here (in that, a setting backdrop actually exists, lol). There's something cozy about sitting at a campfire. I used to go camping all the time when I was a kid. I kinda miss it sometimes.
Anyway, that's all I have to share with regard to Mev. I've got some other character drawings from Barbarian Bunny that I did...I wanna say in October (they're undated)? Maybe I'll share them at a later date. But for now, I hope you like looking at these pieces!