So, I’ve long looked at the encounter tables in the 1983 World of Greyhawk Glossography and wanted to do some reasonable illustrations (I’ve done plenty of derpy sketches over the years but nothing I’d probably want to blog about individually).
I decided to do an elven “serjeant” (2nd level Fighter) of the Knights of the Hart of Highfolk… and I chose to do it in GIMP …with a mouse (no tablet).
Please allow me to share with you some process photos.
First there were the rough sketches to get an idea of what I wanted, regular cheapo mechanical pencil (Bic) on regular low budget printer paper.
I took that scanned JPEG image (using Epson V39 portable-ish scanner) and imported it into GIMP v2.8.22 (freeware). I picked one of the sketches on there that looked painfully much like a cringeworthy My Little Pony tribute, cropped it and got to work inking it with some thick-ish teal lines. I failed to notice that I forgot to ink in the horse’s ears.
So then, when I was happy with the (still ear-less horse) line work, I added my color layer and began to splash around some paint. Still no ears!
Painting was done and ears were finally added. Line-work was then changed to black in preparation for the next stage (I was making up as I went)… which was shading.
So there’s the shading all done. Last was to do highlighting, groundshadow, and a shameless (and an unglamerously weak) signature/tag/initial.
At this point I’m wondering whether I should attempt to turn this guy into a printable paper miniature cutout, a virtual tabletop token, or some other kind of resource image asset. What do you think?
I hope you enjoyed sharing in the madness/methodology behind this particular project. Cheers until next time!
