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.

Anyway, to celebrate the artistic endeavors of last year, we’re introducing the Tellest Art Gallery today.  It has a set of thumbnails of all the art that we’ve displayed on the site so far, and we’ll update it as often as we can when new content comes in.  Enjoy this great new feature on Tellest.com!

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Since we’ve stuck pretty close to the prime races in the Tales of Tellest series of novellas (with the exception of the goblins involvement in Awake), we knew that we were going to be moving away from the races that made the most sense logistically.  The gnolls aren’t necessarily that involved in the Tellest lore just yet (but that’ll change soon enough).  Still, since our focus has been on those prime races, that gave us freedom to move around quite a bit.

We’re showing you, today, the version of the gnoll that we really loved, and that means we were going with something dynamic, as we’re ought to do:

This was still considered the sketch phase, but it gave us a good indication of what the final version of our snarling, mean gnoll was going to look like.  After that initial anatomy was laid out, we had to consider what he was going to wear.

This version of the character took us one step closer to the concept that we really liked.  He has a little more clothing, some better markings, and hair that looked more complete.  But it still paled in comparison to the armored look we had next.

We liked this version for a couple of different reasons.  For one, it gives him a little more character.  Sure, he’s savage, but he’s not an idiot.  He know’s that a little bit of armor can go a long way.  Those shoulder pads also help to rein him in a bit and make him look a little less imposing overall, but just barely.

And then of course we had the beautiful colored version of our snarling savage.  Paul did a great job with this, to the point where we want to make this character into someone permanent.

And though we don’t have a dedicated backdrop to dump this gnoll on, we did manage to cobble together a variation with one of Dena Helmi’s backgrounds.

That’s it for the gnolls, but word on the street is we have a formidable foe for them coming within a few weeks.  Stay tuned for the new race soon!

The post Art: Gnoll Raider appeared first on Tellest.

A few weeks back, we looked at his work on the orcs of Tellest.  We needed them to be more human and have an air of pseudo-nobility. One of the reasons that we did this was in the role of an antagonistic race in Tellest: the goblins.

In a lot of traditional fantasy, goblins are scrappy fodder enemies. They aren’t really a force to be reckoned with, and they aren’t really all that frightening, but when I knew that orcs weren’t going to be the savage, evil creatures they’re usually portrayed as, I needed our goblins to step up in a big way.

Enter Paul Davies.  We knew that we were going to have to put some humanity into the goblins, just as we did the orcs.  After all, what’s a proper villain if you can’t understand their motivations?  Here was the first set that we came up with:

Mischievous and snarky.

As you can see there, the goblins looked very different from the iterations you’ll see in a lot of other popular fantasy brands.  Our goblins are about the size of a human, and if you look at that first concept, they almost have a kind of elvish quality.  We really liked what we had there, and are apt to use that kind of goblin in some instances in the future.  We wanted something a little more vicious, a little more frightening.

This is the kind of guy I don’t want to mess with.

Now we were moving a little closer into the realm of “this guy looks like he would chew the flesh off your bones.”  And not even because he’s hungry.  He’d just do it for fun.  The goblins of Tellest are kind of like the flipped side of the coin that orcs are on.  They’re battle-tested, hardy and worthy enough foes for just about any other race.  I knew we had the right look, so we moved into the next phase, which was a full body concept.

And you thought their faces were scary.

We had a couple of different options, including a more robustly armored version of the goblin, but we wanted them to appear almost tribal in their appearance, as putting the goblin and orc side by side should really give an insight into how they compare and contrast. Again, here our goblin model almost looks somewhat like an elf in some ways.  The sideways pointed ears are a little more animalistic than the upward, classic ear shape of Tellest’s elves though.

Finally, we’ll look at one of our choices for the final sketch that would lead to a painted version:

This one is our runner up.

We’ll return in a couple weeks to show you the final piece, in all its glory.  Paul has done an insanely good job with all these concept art commissions, and the goblins are no exception!

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