Felt like doing another “paintover” practice of one of my older paintings as a warm-up today – which I inevitably spent more time on than I intended. I wouldn’t consider this a “finished” painting, but I’d considered it “finished” as far as its intended practice. :D
This is my “spellweaver” Nightmare Court sylvari from Guild Wars 2, who is one of the main characters from my not-yet-released “Nightmare’s Embrace” project (a future short comic, separate from The Harbinger’s Path Trahearne & Malyck comic). His loyalty to Nightmare is what the quote refers to – like Cadeyrn before him, he believes Nightmare represents the “true” nature of all sylvari, and that the Dream is a corrupting force separating all sylvari from their true selves.
The full version of the original in the full post:
The original version has one of his older quotes, which is for a version of the character I’ve since updated – in his initial iteration, his backstory involved his escaping the Flame Legion, with the help of my (charr) mesmer character, who I had a vague notion of her also being a Flame Legion defector. Caydren’s fire magic was somehow related to either the Eternal Flame, or the Flame Legion fire shamans.
His character has since developed a life of its own, since then – his backstory no longer involves the charr, and instead is fully-enmeshed in sylvari-specific lore.
Also a bonus in-progress step for this paintover from earlier today:
This step uses the original A4 composition before I changed it to a wider composition (11 x 17 ratio), as the A4 ratio felt slightly squished to me in this one. This is also before I decided to make the Fiery Greatsword more recognizable (hopefully), as well as tune some things in terms of focus (the sword was drawing the eye away from Caydren’s expression, I thought).
And also just the two paintings again below, side-by-side, because I like flipping through the two compare the changes:
You can sort of tell how the 2017 version started out in greyscale. Especially with the lack of vibrancy in the Fiery Greatsword’s flames. I was much less comfortable using color directly, compared to 2025, whereas this year I’ve been practicing using color directly more – including for this paintover.
I also really enjoyed updating Caydren’s expression to better reflect his current personality – his original iteration had a much more subdued temperament, relating to his initial and outdated backstory. Whereas now, he is far more vicious than his original incarnation. A proper devotee to Nightmare, haha!
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