The Dragonriders of Pern - Character Concepts

'The Dragonriders of Pern' by Anne McCaffrey was one of the first book series I ever read, aside from the Narnia series. My obsession with it when I was young led me to discover the online roleplaying/gaming community of Pern in late 1999, early 2000 before the release of the Dragonriders of Pern game for PC and Dreamcast. These MUCKs and MUDs were text based games with themes set to particular times in the official books. People all over the world created their own characters and we'd spin off our own stories.

Over the years, I managed to create roughly 7 different characters from these games, many of them retired and only a few that I actively log in. During this time, several of these characters went through heavy development. Each has a huge history that I've written up. But only recently, have I begun to draw them. So this post is dedicated, a little, to the few concept drawings I have of two of my more current Pernese characters:

J'sek - I posted an earlier concept of him in a post down below. Since then, I've tweaked a few details, although I'm still not settled on his design. I plan to do many more of him, as he's been one of my more actively played characters and one that I have plenty of fodder to work off of when it comes to inspiration.

I also toyed around with some expressions - quick sketches done just to get a feel for his facial structure, but also because I felt I needed more practice with human expressions.

I also decided to give a try at a Pernese dragon by drawing J'sek's blue Areteth. What made Areteth even more difficult to do was that he was born with a broken front arm and foot. While the arm healed, the foot never did and several of the fingers curl oddly. I tried a hand at just putting his base colour in with no shade or highlight rendering. I kind of like the design, but I'll be going over it when I get the chance.

G'rism - Another relatively new character, I did a quick pen sketch of him while doodling on scrap paper. I went over the pose on another sheet of paper in colerase this time and did a quick rendering just to see how it would work out. I'll definitely be doing more sketches of him and maybe throw in more of his firelizard Fahren and maybe even his bronze dragon Troyseth.

The Highwayman - Concepts

I've always been a fan of the poem 'The Highwayman' by Alfred Noyes, ever since I first read it in my English class in Elementary School. Later, I discovered the song version of it done by Loreena Mckennitt and that inspired me into slowly developing yet another project. So I began to do research and slowly am I beginning to put the pieces together to either make a simple storyboard lieca reel of The Highwayman or simply keep it at character and layout design.

So far though, I've just been toying around with character design:

Above is a lineup of all the quick sketches I did of Bess. I was having a particularly tough time figuring out her hair and upper body. So at one point, I kept going over the same drawing once I figured I'd hit on something. Eventually, I settled on the seventh drawing:

The "Highwayman" - as I call him, considering he's never given a real name aside from his title, is proving to be the biggest challenge. So far, I've only managed to whip up one concept of him that I find promising that I had done in pen while scribbling on some scrap paper:

And that's all I have, so far on this project. Once I finish wrapping up a few more commissions, I plan on getting back around to this and, at least, getting some decent full bodied sketches and poses done of these two characters.

Commissions and Things...

Way back when I first started really getting a feel for drawing, spending most of my time doing fan art of a few of my favorite t.v. shows and video games at the time and heavily admiring the artwork of other artist's who's skill and talent surpassed me, I discovered not only a fandom that enjoyed my work (I drew a lot of dragons at this point too...) but a term I had never heard before - commissions.

So that's the short end of the story on how I got snared into doing a vast majority of commission work for a vast array of people with equally as unique characters. Very few, if any, were human. Most were more anthropomorphic or animals - real or fantasy wise. For years, this remained my only theme that I stuck to when I'd draw, but recently I've been trying to break that habit.

Even so, here are a few pieces of recent work that are some of my better ones, over the years:

Kittimer - This was one of the bigger commissions I've ever received. And tough too - considering I never drew foxes before, let alone a half-human one. But after many (many) revisions and tweaking - this was the result.






Gepard - This one was an exchange for someone paying for my account on a game I frequent often online (nasty habit, those things...). In return, I was offering a single character commission and this was the result. It remains one of my few favorite pieces among the huge pile of commission work I've done.

I've done a lot of commissions, from small to large and it's a pass time I don't think I'll ever give up. I greatly enjoy getting a chance to draw someone's character - no matter how simple or unusual it may be.

For more commission work done by me, including much older artwork, visit: http://zeralia.deviantart.com

Of course, not all the work I do is commission based. I do do some of my own artwork, although lately it's taken a back seat after I got swamped with my retail job and commissions. But just before C-ACE and AC rolled around, I was able to pull these two together - Honovi, the deer centaur (pictured above) and Nexi, my anthropomorphic hippogryph: