#67 - hardening

This commission is from May 2018.

This was also the first project featuring a Kul'tiran and a LF Draenei. The goat was pretty straightforward to use, but the Kul'tiran was a bit of a disaster in hindsight. The model was from BFA's beta, and while posing him for this commission, I definitely noticed how unpolished he was compared to the other player models. Many joints were missing, particularly around his face, which made giving him expressive emotions rather difficult. It seemed as if the model was still in an unfinished state. They received more substantial updates in 8.1.5, when they became playable. Those updates pretty much fixed most of the issues I had with the OG model that I was using here.

The rest of this commission is mostly straightforward. Honestly speaking, I'm not a big fan of this one. I don't think it's aging nicely, and there are so many stylistic choices I made here that I simply don't agree with anymore. Poses are too rigid. The lighting is too bright. I suck, and still suck, at drawing body fluids. Etc., etc.

That being said, I remember this project being very popular when I first posted it on Tumblr all those years ago. That last shot of the Kul'tiran in particular, showing off his ass from an angle while subtly turning his head back to look at us, was an extremely popular post. Over 1k (or even 2k) notes on Tumblr, which was a huge number for a random hobbyist like me. I'm still definitely proud of that feat, if nothing else.

I think I might revisit some of the creative ideas I used here in this project, but I probably won't remake it any time soon.

There's a rather elaborate mini-comic that was supposed to accompany this project which I infamously scrapped, and I'll be covering that in another post. A lot of context regarding the story for this project is unfortunately lost because of that mini-comic being scrapped.