BG1 Xan portrait

"I'll do what I can, but expect very little."

I've been kind of in a depression rut lately, and art has been a little harder than usual. Ironically I thought I'd try out a new technique painting the most dour RPG companion of all time.

Xan is my absolute favorite Baldur's Gate companion, just ahead Astarion and Haer'dalis. It's majorly due to the incredible romance mod for him that's a part of the BG1 NPC Project. There is also a mod for BG2 that adds him as a fully fleshed out companion and romance to continue the story, and it's just really wonderfully well written. He's so miserable. He's SUCH a mood. Has an amazing magical sword and is nearly unable to use it in combat.

I can't believe Xan's only mentions in BG3 were his ugly hireling son (???) Zenith and that weird fanfic book about him and his Moonblade. character assassination.

I know that BG1&2 are tragically overlooked by the BG3 fandom due to the games being so "dated," but I cannot stress how the modding community for BG1&2 (as well as Neverwinter Nights) allow those games to take on whole new worlds in ways that mods these days cannot achieve. Plus BG1 and 2 have so many companions that you will literally forget half of them exist...

Anyways, I tried a more stylized approach for the piece. Ironically this method is not a "new" technique for me- it's actually the method I used for digital painting when I first started out. I've heard it called "sketchlifting" which I did not coin- I think I learned it from an ex League of Legends artist's tutorials 10 years ago. I can't believe I've been painting this long.

It was actually really fun revisiting a technique I used to swear by a decade ago with more experienced eyes. Essentially you sketch in grayscale, then you can use the Photoshop RGB channel to lift the sketch off of the layer so it becomes like a lineart layer. Then you can color underneath as well as use overlay layers on top. It sound complicated when I am typing it out, but I used to scan and color my graphite illustrations that way.

This was the original "sketch" that I painted over and under for this piece:

I think I nerfed his glorious chin a bit in the final but I like both facial structures.

Usually, I refine a horrific blob of airbrush and composite/photobashed 3D and 2D assets to achieve what I end up with, sketching over and refining bit by bit, but unfortunately it's kind of an unreliable process. And hideous. I have probably a dozen horrible half finished Astarion pieces alone that will never see the light of day. Poor Lae'zel has an entire folder of failed paintings. I swear I meant to paint her more, it's just that I can't ever get her to emote right in my pieces.

Starting with black and white allows me to commit to the structure of the piece a bit more before I get to the color. I'm hoping to experiment more with this style because I think it's a little more of a streamlined process.

Overall, when I'm feeling a bit down, my ability to create art tanks too. And then that makes it worse because painting makes me happy. So usually switching things up a bit helps a lot.

Anyways, I hope this little insight into my process is interesting. Go install the BG1 NPC Project and play BG1 to romance this miserable (and romantic) elf!! (if you want to)

~Lily