Creating Vhaeraun and slaying artblock

Hi guys! With this post today, I thought it would be fun to do a little write-up in my process for this month's print club print. Since the theme this month is Drow gods, specifically Vhaeraun for the main print (Eilistraee piece is in the WIP stages for the mini) I had to do a little more conceptual work than I normally do.

Particularly for Vhaeraun, official depictions of him are rather sparse. I find this kind of curious as I've always considered him to be kind of a part of a "big 3" with Lolth and Eilistraee.

If you aren't familiar with him, he is the son of Lolth and Corellon Larethian (the high elf Big Cheese god). Many Drow males worship him as one of his main "tenets" is that he wants to have equality between genders amongst the matriarchal Drow society. He lurks in the shadows and his followers work toward the goal of all elves overtaking the surface. Typically Evil leaning overall, and interestingly made himself enemy #1 of the other Drow gods for wildly varying reasons.

When it comes to painting characters that don't really "exist" visually, it takes a lot more work concepting/planning/getting to know the character. Astarion has just about every buttcheek pore documented somewhere on the internet, so the process of creating a painting of him is a lot simpler for me. Vhaeraun, on the other hand, was jumping into nearly uncharted waters.

I recorded little bits and pieces of my exploration process to show you guys a little how I work, especially working through artblock. I find that messing around with a lot of different mediums can help spark some ideas.

Originally, I was going for a more playful air. You can see that in my early exploration. I was going for a bit more of a "Loki" vibe. However, Vhaeraun really is quite a serious character, and I think this original path I was taking was a bit off. His entire essence revolves around uniting the elven races through underhanded means. This guy is BFFs with Shar- I will go into why I took such a turn later.

First of all, I wanted to try some doodling, more stylized kind of stuff to get an idea of how I wanted Vhaeraun's face and mask to look. I worked on this piece here, built a really rough 3D mockup for it then sketched/lined over it in Realistic Paint Studio. I like the program for sketching (highly recommend it) though in my opinion it's not robust enough for any serious pieces. The fun added effect is that it has built-in recording so that's nice.

DOODLE VIDEO LINK

I ported these lines over into Rebelle 7 because I wanted to try out their airbrush and pigment mixing features. Once again a fun program to play around in but I really don't see a lot of use in it (for me) for a full painting process. It's great for adding finishing texture, or creating unique textures to use elsewhere. This was definitely a "let's just goof around and see what happens" stage.

I did some thumbnails in photoshop and then went over to Rebelle.

As you can see, I was really going wild with colors on this. I know a lot of my pieces are pretty colorful, but for myself I tend to work really saturated and then regret it after the piece is complete. For this project for the month I'm REALLY trying to let subtle color speak and worry more about my values, so in the final piece/s you can see I went in a wildly different direction color-wise.

I think that I prefer to paint art that is very saturated, but I prefer to look at art that is more muted/earthy. I'm trying to meet myself in the middle and tone it down a bit.

At this point, I realized I wanted to take this in a totally different direction. My favorite Dungeons and Dragons depictions are from BG1&2, Neverwinter Nights, and the older Forgotten Realms novels/sourcebooks. There is a lot more grit to the settings when it comes to the art direction, not to mention more muted tones. I also wanted to borrow from the depiction of Shar in BG3, since she is such a good representation of this "faction" of deities she and Vhaeraun both come from.

I looked through some sourcebooks and decided what I wanted to do for the final pieces. Then, it was time to get sculpting. I kept my sort of Loki-ish trickster look in mind for Vhaeraun, and thought I'd let the colors push my vision a bit more. I used the above piece as a guide/"concept art" for my sculpt. In this video you will see my process sculpting his face, painting texture, then sculpting his mask from a cutout of his face.

The cool thing about sculpting character's unique faces is that I can paint them repeatedly with excellent continuity. Every character I paint I have a model of that I use in this way. (I do have some more "generic" ones that I can tweak in smaller ways for characters I know I won't be painting more than once.)

As far as the mask, I wanted to keep it as close to the original artwork (in the DnD sourcebook) of it as possible- it's got this almost beak-like nose and the kind of Batman-esque shape to it. I really wanted to make it look like it could belong amongst the same world that BG3's Shar inhabits, and less "goofy" than the original.

SCULPTING VID LINK

What is really interesting about prepping 3D to be completely painted over, is that there are a lot of things I do that a regular 3D character artist would probably shudder at, lol. Basically "good enough" is what I chant over and over. The renders I create are hideous most of the time. They are essentially the sketch I completely paint over. Daz Studio is great for posing and doing rough renders- I don't think it has a lot of merit in the professional 3D space, but it does suit me just fine for how I use it. I don't really want the 3D underneath visible at all, so I spend a lot of time tweaking the colors and painting over.

Here is a side-by-side of the mask piece, the render on the left, the final painting on the right.

And here is a side-by-side of the portrait as well. I slapped a generic hair on his model so I could get the colors in the lighting right. Sometimes I leave the hair out completely but when it comes to weirder lighting it can help to have the color reference underneath. I also put a simple turtleneck on him to use as a base to paint over for the outfit. A lot of the 3D process for me is getting the colors in the right general location so I can do less guesswork as I paint.

Trying to step-by-step record this process slowed me down to an absolute SNAIL'S pace, so I don't suspect I will do this often, but I wanted to show a peek into how I actually put a painting together. I guess I wanted to show my process to illustrate that there are so many ways to project your ideas into art that don't involve using morally dubious generative processes.

I personally struggle horribly with sketching, and I always have. 3D has really changed my life with the ability to see every moving piece before me and iterate as many "sketches" as I want before I commit. I started learning the basics of 3D several years ago. I've mentioned before that I have a lot of scrapped pieces in my painting graveyard. The devastation of working on hand painting something for hours to realize it isn't working just took its toll on me SO hard. The usage of 3D makes it so much easier to be like "this isn't working" and scrap it with little heartache, or fix it without it being a huge chore.

Overall, I hope this kind of "blog post" is at least a little interesting! Eilistraee piece incoming for the mini print (hopefully) soon!

Reminder that next month's print club is going to be Skyrim/Elder Scrolls themed, friends! 

I hope you all are doing well, and thank you so much as always for your support.

~Lily