Practicing

The title of this piece is also its reason for existing. This drawing was created to practice several things; first, I needed to practice drawing mister Valas here; second, I wanted to practice mixing a couple types of traditional media. This is both charcoal - to make the smoother texture of the skin and set up base values for shading - and colored pencil, to make the picture more interesting than grayscale. Other media almost got involved (oil pastels were considered for the fire and watercolors were considered for setting up flat coloring) but it's a good thing that they didn't because I'm terrible with those, and they probably would have ruined everything.

This is Valas Gidren! He hasn't appeared here before, but his story has been in the works since 2012, shortly after the Dawnguard expansion came out for Skyrim. Valas is an aspiring mage, and aims to restore House Telvanni and the Dunmer homeland of Morrowind to their former glory. Big goals for a small mage.

I'm very pleased with how this turned out. It's far from perfect, of course, but I learned some things about light and humanoid anatomy and clothing; three big weaknesses of mine that have desperately needed improvement. Mostly I'm pleased, though, because Valas looks stunningly accurate. And his ears! I love drawing ears!

General's charcoal pencil (both white and black) and Crayola colored pencil on Strathmore toned gray sketch paper. Minor editing done in Paint.NET to adjust contrast (the picture scanned looking washed-out) and remove stray marks from testing colors.
Valas is mine, but the Elder Scrolls games and their concepts, races, etc. belong to Bethesda.