“Spellweaver Caydren” | 2025 paintover of a 2017 painting.
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.
2025 Paintover; vertical crop.
Original 2017 version; vertical crop
The full version of the original in the full post:
“Mist Stranger Trahearne” | 2025 paintover of a 2021 painting; vertical crop.
This is a 2025 practice paintover of one of my older paintings of Trahearne from 2021. I’ll put the original at the end of the post, and you can flip between them for comparison (and judge me on how much I’ve improved or not since, haha).
I remember thinking this fan theory quite fun at the time – it is not my fan theory, and I believe I saw it mentioned on both Reddit and Tumblr occassionally, at the time. (I can’t recall if it originated from one person, or multiple people – if you happen to know, feel free to share and I’ll add this info into this post). Edit: Found some links from the time! On Tumblr and Reddit. Thanks to @scarlet-briar on Bluesky for the Tumblr info (it is their theory and Tumblr page in the link!).
“Mist Stranger Trahearne” | 2025 paintover of a 2021 painting; full composition.
The general theory is that the Mist Stranger might be Trahearne, perhaps from an alternate timeline. While the idea doesn’t fit into my “headcanon” projects for The Harbinger’s Path and Nightmare’s Embrace, it’s still fun thinking about alternate possibilities people cleverly speculate on. Especially as, this one involved the possibility for the character reappearing again in-game.
For this painting, I remember being fond of the overall composition, or perhaps the concept of the composition – but when I randomly saw the file again over the weekend, I realized the composition had some problems. Some visually awkward moments. The full version is a horizontal composition – which I think I’ve improved slightly from the original, though I still prefer it as the cropped portrait version at the top of this post, instead of the full canvas above.
The main thing I wanted to try was some of the techniques I’ve been using in The Harbinger’s Path comic pages, but applied to a painting/illustration. Quite fun!
Below (in the full post) is the 2025 paintover, followed after by the original 2021 version for comparison:
2025 paintover of a 2021 painting | Work-in-progress
I’ve had this drawing of Arquel around for several years, that I first did during one of the days for “Paint-ober” in 2021. This was a daily painting challenge I made up for myself during October of that year (if it existed prior, I don’t think I saw anyone participating that year). I was inspired to try this challenge by the ubiquitous “Inktober” which used to be in vogue years back. Ironically, I decided to do my own, non-ink challenge at the time, because I didn’t have interest in doing line or “ink” drawings back then. Oh, how making comic pages has transformed me! Haha.
I’ll always adore painting, of course – it’s still what I am more comfortable with. Anyway, I always liked the concept behind this Paint-ober Arquel painting – I mainly thought the color palette turned out in a pleasing way. I intended to finish the painting after the month-long challenge, and I did fuss around with it here and there, afterward.
Below are the original and an earlier version:
2023 paintover – this is how the file looked when I opened it today
Original 2021 painting
My dilemma with this painting is it always felt like it was “almost there” to me, but never “there.” I felt that with the original drawing, and also with the 2023 version (this version is how the file looked when I opened it today). This caused me to set this painting aside for long stretches of time, and dabble with it infrequently – with years-long stretches, apparently!
I had the random urge to revisit it again today – from the filename, for the first time since 2023. And now, there’s the current 2025 version, at the top of this post.
I still don’t think it is “quite there,” but each time, I think it’s veering closer. These paintovers are fun for me, though rather self-indulgent, as it would probably make better sense for me to start a new painting of the same idea, at this point. But, I am enjoying fiddling with this painting now and again, because I enjoy seeing what I would do differently each time, compared to the last time I opened the painting. The 2023 version I started approaching faces differently – slightly more defined forms and shadows – which I think is further developed in the 2025 version today. Today’s version also had much higher contrast compared to how it looks now – I might update this post with that version to compare.
And here it is:
2025 paintover, earlier version with higher contrast
There are some things I think might work better in this version, but I’m leaning toward exploring more of the subtler, more atmospheric tone of the one at the top of the post.
“The Nightmare Harbinger” or “Harbinger Malyck” | 2025 updated version (WIP)
I’ve been putting the final adjustments for the first chapter of The Harbinger’s Path, and thought it would be fun to show two past paintings of Trahearne and Malyck which were early representations for what has developed into this comic project. Only, when I saw the Malyck painting again, all I could notice were all the errors I wanted to fix!
I ended up spending some time yesterday doing a paintover of it – for fun, but also for practice. At the time it was painted (all the way back in 2018), I could see there were errors – which I had tried to fix, but not entirely successfully. It ended up being very satisfying painting over it, as I could now do many of the things I aspired to do at the time, but which were out of grasp for my skill level (though the current version is not perfect by any means – but hopefully mostly presentable in its current state, haha).
I also realized there were several things about Malyck’s design which I didn’t draw accurately back then – mainly his leather gauntlets and additional belt straps (though by far not limited to only those). I could not believe I forgot his additional belt straps, because nowadays, those are some of my favorite aspects of his design to draw!
“The Nightmare Harbinger” (2025 WIP version)
Without additional atmospheric washes
Original 2018 version
Above are the current and original versions, for comparison. I still think the overall concept for the 2018 painting was solid, but the intended pose I was going for was more complex than what my skill level was capable of back then.
The raw file for this updated version is very messy in its full resolution, which is why I don’t consider it finished yet (and in the version without the additional color washes, you can plainly see the unfinished, rough areas). Until then, hopefully its current state is again mostly presentable!
“Trahearne and the Jungle Dragon”
“The Nightmare Harbinger” (2025 WIP version)
And here it is as the pair of paintings I intended to post yesterday (now with this updated version of the Malyck painting).
The Trahearne painting is even older, from 2016. There are definitely parts of the anatomy I would do differently now, but I think compared to the 2018 version of the Malyck painting, this worked much better because of the decorative aspect of the sylvari design (I’m perpetually in awe of Kristen Perry’s design direction for concepting them – if you’ve never seen her documentation for GW2’s sylvari redesign, go check it out now – you’re in for a treat!) (I’m also so happy her site is up now! And that we can still view her design documents easily today. There’s so much to learn from admiring her design sensibilities!).
The Harbinger’s Path Launch Date (and extra odds and ends)
Launch Date: May 12
I should also probably mention somewhere on this sketchblog that the comic is slated to launch next Monday, May 12th! I also want to put together some fun extras, mainly a PDF of the first chapter which will be free to download. With how unreliable social media has become, I’ve also been meaning to set up a mailing list of some sort for a long while (there’s a link on my portfolio site, and at the bottom of the this blog’s homepage, but I never ended up sharing it anywhere else yet) – I’m planning to offer the PDF of the first chapter as a little bonus for joining the mailing list.
Chapter 1 PDF Extras
It’ll have some bonus art in it, either things like some of my favorite lineart drawings from the first chapter (before colors were added), and/or preview layout drafts from the next chapter(s) (I have up to chapter 3 drafted, but I’ll probably limit this to chapter 2 previews).
One of the reasons I didn’t end up sharing the mailing list when I first set it up, is because I didn’t know yet how I wanted to use it. I’ve had time to ponder it for a while now, and my current thought is I might segment the mailing list into different interests – but probably not too many, as that sounds like it might become complicated for me to manage. More thoughts about this in the full post if you, for some reason, wish to read my thinking aloud to myself, haha:
Crop from an Arquel painting I think might be fun to finish.
Corveil in his fancy new parka. This was mainly an excuse to try out the design.
Corveil in his parka with the hood up.
Arquel practice.
Crop from an Arquel painting I was fiddling with. For whatever reason, I seem to tend to draw the face from this angle when sketching aimlessly.
More experimenting with Corveil’s color scheme.
I was also experimenting with Vaknaa’s color scheme a bit – her original eyes were a dark blue-green color. I was trying out amber eyes with her for a while, and am now pretty settled on giving those to Corveil instead. I was then trying out a more mint color for Vaknaa, but am leaning toward her original darker blue-green coloration again.
This is a paintover of an old Kurt sketch from a few years ago. (It might even be in the archives of this sketchblog, but I couldn’t find it on a cursory search. Which reminds me how I need to improve the search results display for this blog, haha.)
I was curious to see if painting over such an old sketch would have any interesting results, or if it would look noticeably different with my current painting style/skills versus years back. I was expecting disastrous results – but to my surprise, the paintover was an improvement from the original painting.
