Last time we talked about the kaja, we talked about how we had a pose that we had to narrow the model down to.  Instead, we took pieces of two of them.

We really wanted to dial back from the very dynamic shots that had from some of our other characters, but we didn’t want her standing there waiting to enter combat after her male cohorts did all the ground work.  This pose gave her a little bit more of a flirting-with-danger, come hither look.

After that, Paul worked his magic, and we came up with a very good sketch of our final piece.  This kitty has claws, and she looked so expressive even at this stage of her creation.

I have a lot of respect for Paul, and what he does.  When he creates these characters, he develops a backstory for them in his head.  He’s already come up with ideas for the goblin and the orc that he did, but with this character, I think I beat him to the punch.  This kaja is a dragonspeaker, a leader of her community that can actually commune with the great tyrants, and keeps a harmony between them.

Next up, Paul put together a nice color scheme for our savage dragonspeaker.

At this point, you can see just how well she’s coming along.  Her attire has more personality.  The minutiae of her physical features is expressive – Paul did a great freaking job with this.

I would have even considered this piece finished at this point, but he went and touched up our kaja even more.

The dragonspeaker had more patterns to her fur and skin at this point.  Individual flecks and circles dotted her caramel colored body, and the gem in her staff is throwing off wisps of magic.

Rhianna and I even came up with a name for this champion, and that’s how we ended up with our very first story-less hero.

Kaiyonani was an awesome way for us to wrap up our art projects from 2014.  I’m so looking forward to working with Paul again throughout this year!

This incredible new champion has been inducted to the Tellest Art Gallery.  Check her out, along with the other finished pieces from Paul’s collection of commissions!

The post Art: Kaja Dragonspeaker, Kaiyonani appeared first on Tellest.

In keeping with his concept art for the races, Paul Davies has finished work on one of the coolest ones yet.  This time, he tackled the kaja, Tellest’s catlike race.  We tinkered around with a lot of different options before we settled on a final bit of art that I know you’ll love.

This one is nice, too, because it shows you how much different the kaja are than the gnolls.  Of course, each race is varied enough in their own ways that these are just particular extremes.  Today’s pieces also highlight the first female that Paul has done for us.

Let’s look at some of these concepts.

The first thing we needed to decide on was what we wanted our kaja to look like.  Were they a nice human to cat hybrid?  Did they look like the Thundercats?

In these first two experiments, we had a pair that really could have worked.  They looked cool as hell.  But I knew that in Tellest, there was more of a feline look to the kaja than what we saw here.  So we had to take it to the next step.

This variation, too, managed to capture a little bit more of what we were looking for, but it really started to come together in our next piece.  I felt like this particular concept really moved us forward in the right direction.

Once we knew what we were looking for, Paul did an awesome job of providing us with some pretty cool clothing options, in addition to a base body type.  This is exactly what you’d expect one of the kaja from Tellest to look like.

After that, we needed to determine what our character’s pose was going to look like.  Paul gave us a few to choose from:

I absolutely loved that these looked like they could have been the beginning of a five person kaja fighting team.  In fact, I would not be opposed to that in the future!  Of course, we did have to narrow it down, and we chose one of those up there.  As cool as they all were, I just know you’re going to love what we finally landed on.  She’s the coolest one we’ve done to date.

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