Sketches & Studies

Trahearne Pencil Sketch | October 14, 2025

Guild Wars 2, Pencil / Ink, Sketches & Studies
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Paper sketch of Trahearne from Guild Wars 2. Drawn with a mechanical pencil. He looks pensively off-camera. Half-body cropping.
Trahearne Pencil Sketch | Drawn with a 0.3 mm Staedtler mechanical drafting pencil

Sketched Trahearne the other day when Krita froze, and I decided waiting in vain even though that only seems to work 10% of the time (this was not one of those times). Fortunately, I didn’t lose anything substantial since my last save. 

The full sketch has Malyck in it, but I don’t think he turned out as well. Might still post the full version later in this post at some point. The photo above is also an earlier version, and I slightly prefer this version – I think I overworked parts of it later on. Ah well, learning! Remembering how to draw with pencil again! 

My installation of Krita has been acting a little oddly, which I suspect might be because I have it installed in a portable installation on an external, and I think it is copied over from the previous external I was using. I’m not sure if that should affect anything or not, but I finally installed the latest version of Krita onto it. It immediately loads much more quickly now – hopefully there’ll be no more freezing, too! 

Also! You can see I did end up eventually acquiring the Hobonichi pencil board I semi-joked about way back in February! :D It was a bit of a splurge purchase when I made an order to JetPens earlier this year for some notebooks. It ended up being very practical, though – sometimes I want to jot down a note right after doing something in the kitchen that requires me to wash my hands, and before the pencil board, I always had to wait a few minutes for them to completely dry, otherwise any residual moisture crinkled the paper. But now, with the pencil board, I can just jot down a note right away without needing to wait those moments. It also is very useful as a bookmark (it has currently been living on page 178, which is a chart I made during chapter 2 to plot every page’s progress for the entirety of the comic!). 

The last thing I use it for is as a smudge guard for pencil drawings, like this one, though I feel I did something wrong because it ended up smudging the drawing lol, that I later had to fix with some pinpointed erasing. And I don’t ever use it for its “intended” purpose, which is to put behind the current page, to draw over a flatter/smoother surface. But it is so useful in these other ways, that I don’t mind this. And the pattern is too appealing! Tiny birds! 

Daggerheart Infernis Character Design (In-Progress) | October 12, 2025

Digital Art, Sketches & Studies
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Daggerheart character design of an Infernis wizard. He has large, curved horns, glowing flame-colored eyes, and wields swirls of fire-like magic between his palms.

This is half-character design and half-construction anatomy practice from imagination. Friend wants to try GMing a Daggerheart campaign, and I’m repurposing my DnD Tiefling I created for when she GMed that practice campaign. 

I’m sorry this character always seems to be shirtless, haha. I figure if he’s starting from level 1 in these campaigns, he can’t have acquired fancy clothes yet! For the DnD campaign. I did end up choosing Wizard, and I believe he was an Illusionist. I’m planning to choose similar for this Daggerheart campaign, as the classes seem to have some similarities (as do the ancestries – Infernis and Tiefling seeming likewise similar). I’ll probably choose an illusionist wizard for his Daggerheart version, as well, to build more familiarity with how to play this type of character in these types of game (which I more or less play similarly to GW2’s mesmer class – one of my favorites). 

Alternate cropping of the same painting, with a more vertical composition.Alternate cropping for this one. 

Anatomy Practice / Lorcan WIP | August 12, 2025

Animated Images, Digital Art, Guild Wars 2, Sketches & Studies, Work-In-Progress
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Edit August 13, 2025: Added the fullbody WIP composition! 

In-progress drawing of a shirtless sylvari holding an oversized hammer.
Anatomy practice / Lorcan WIP | Lorcan with the “Onus” hammer skin

Anatomy practice! I’ve been practicing drawing anatomy construction from imagination this year, and this is one of those practices. So, please forgive me for any anatomical inaccuracies, as these are for practicing this type of anatomy construction drawing from imagination. 

I’ve been having fun running around in the “Untamed” build for my ranger, which I never knew how fun a spec it is to play (mainly because of the amazing vocal lines Brandon Bales recorded for it, haha – but also the main “unleashed” hammer skill is so fun and satisfying!). It gives me an excuse to finally use my favorite hammer skin – “Onus” – which I’ve never used before because I haven’t enjoyed hammer skills on any character prior. I believe it is also a Halloween skin – so perhaps hopefully I can finish this drawing by this Halloween! 

Here’s the full composition: 

Full composition (in-progress)

I also figured out a better way to draw chains with this drawing – when I’ve drawn chains for commissions before, I made a chain brush. I was too lazy to find or recreate that brush again for this drawing, and this time I just drew them manually – but surprisingly, this ended up being both quicker than when I used to use that brush, and I also like the visual result more. I remember the chain brush I made always had this uncanny “too even” appearance, which I then had to spend time making the links look more organic. 

With just drawing them with a regular round brush now, it naturally lends itself to an organic feel. (Of course, perhaps now it might be not even enough. Though between the two, my personal preference is a little too organic versus too inorganic or stiff). 

And a few extra/earlier versions in the rest of the post below: 

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Malyck Pencil Drawing | May 22, 2025

Guild Wars 2, Pencil / Ink, Sketches & Studies
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Update: May 22, 2025

Pencil drawing of the sylvari Malyck from GW2. Black and white drawing on light paper, with a Staedtler mechanical drafting pencil beside it for scale.
Malyck Pencil Drawing | Finished version

I think I figured out what I found displeasing about the original “finished” version of this drawing (the version right below this text), and why I preferred the earlier sketch – it’s likely because I didn’t darken the tops of his eye socks/below his brows, to match the contrast that was in the earlier sketch. I think it gave him the appearance of not having eyebrows, or having too-light eyebrows, which lessened the contrast I liked in that early sketch version.

Changed the date on the drawing to today’s, since it’s a different enough change to me now. Oh! I also meant to mention how the lighting conditions varied a bit through the photos (I’m next to a window) – I tried to adjust the photos to match the drawing as closely as I could to how it is on the paper, and hopefully the lighting doesn’t look too inconsistent.

Original post below:

Original version of the finished pencil drawing of Malyck. The main difference is less shading around his eyes and brows.
Malyck Pencil Drawing | Original “finished” version

Malyck warm-up drawing from yesterday when my hand was feeling stiff. Also, I’ve been practicing my letterforms recently – how does it look? Is it too ostentatious? Haha.

I’ve never been fond of how cursive “L” looks when I write it, which has been a small annoyance throughout the years as both my name and pseudonym begin with the letter. I also have always had messy handwriting, and earlier this year when I started using physical notebooks again, it inspired me to try practicing my handwriting to see if I could improve it. 

To my mild horror, I realized so much time had passed since the last time I wrote cursive by hand, I had to look up how to write some letterforms again! This shocked me, because I grew up writing almost exclusively cursive. I remember enjoying writing in it over print/block letters, by a substantial amount. How could I have forgotten? 

Anyway, in my search for a sheet showing basic cursive to remind myself, it lead me to become interested in “scripts” – not programming scripts or screenplays, haha – but styles of calligraphic writing which have been popular in the past (and present!).

I became partial to a script called “Old English Copperplate,” which is a type of handwriting which seemed most popular during the 18th century/1700’s in the west. It has flourishes and embellishments I find aesthetically pleasing, and I also thought they might be useful practice for improving my hand control. As I’ve never been confident in my writing abilities (or fond of how much hand writing looks). Oh! Though, I should mention that while I follow some of the script’s letterform’s, I don’t follow it precisely. The – I think they’re called “descenders?” – but tlike what you see in the lowercase “g” and “y” in “Malyck” and “Landy” written beside the artwork – those aren’t aren’t accurate to the script. They’re fun to write the loops this way!

And, as a bonus, I think it has been improving my drawings when using digital!

Earlier version of the "finished" drawing.
Earlier version of the finished drawing before adding small refinements today.

I like this drawing more as a sketch (the image captioned “Drawing work-in-progress” above) than how it looked in its original final version, seen above. I tried some small refinements this morning (the top image of this post), which I think helps a bit. But I still prefer how it looked in that earlier sketch version.

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