Theodin was introduced a little late in the game, after Kev came back as Alexander (though he had missed the one session after that).  He ended up being introduced in our sewer session, though I had some clever ways of trying to alleviate that.  One way, in particular, was to have the players be able to leave the sewer at some opportune places.  We had a spot that I wanted to act as a bit of an info dump, and get my players away from playing it the way they normally would, so I found an image online of a wizard’s study, and made it so that the players could look at the image and tell me places they would want to search.  I had ten places in the image that I “hid” notes from a caretaker of the sewers, and it would give them hints as to what was going on in the sewers, weapons that could help in their plight, and even other characters they could meet, given the right preparation.  But in the midst of all that, I had a knock on the door, and Theodin was there waiting for the players.  He was sent there by the same person who brought the group together earlier, so I had a way to get the lore in place.  But also, he had some skin in the game, because the Enkindled Brotherhood, our bad guy syndicate, had torn up a large part of the grove that he had protected for much of his life.

Theodin was more quiet and reserved, but in this first image, he almost looks pitiable.  He stood in sharp contrast to everyone else, so we tried to empower him, and asked Valence to change the style a bit to bring him in line with our other characters.

You can see in the very next picture, our little dwarven druid has a look more of conviction than of waning confidence.  Theodin deserves to be a member of Cora’s Champions, and this art helps to evoke that notion.  We elected to keep Theodin under a hood, and a robe of leaves, and it makes him look peculiar and interesting, and this sketch barely does justice to where Valence was able to take his talents.

Our first color image of the dwarven druid helps to get an idea of his style.  Though he’s small, he’s scrappy.  He doesn’t have the huge beard that many dwarves in fantasy are known for, but he’s not a traditional dwarf by any means.  He’s lived amongst the forest—a caretaker of sorts—so he’s always going to carry a piece of that with him.  He looks almost rogue-like, and in some ways, he probably would act like that, since he’s not trying to be the center of attention.

Valence’s final look at the character shows a bit of a bushier cloak, even if the beard hasn’t grown anymore.  His cloak also billows out at the end as well, giving it more presence.  Theodin’s gaze is a little wilder.  You don’t live on your own without having a few quirks here and there.  Ultimately, Valence saved some of his best work for last, and we are so very happy to have this version of Theodin’s character up for display.

At the time of this writing, we have plans to continue working with Valence, but thus far, we haven’t finished our first follow-up.  We have really great ideas for what we want to do, but you can’t rush greatness, and I want Valence to move forward at his own pace.  Hopefully by the time you see this, we’ll already be in the midst of working on the new content!

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We start off with a few sketches, from general pen strokes to a bit more line art and finally a general idea of what his face will look like.

The next image that Valence got us was one that was full color, and had a tremendous amount of polish on it.  At this point, Alexander practically looked like a Disney character.  You can see that he was presented as the rogue he is, with his hood up, and with blades at hand.

Our penultimate version of the image takes things a step further, putting some shine on the armor pieces.  Ultimately we knew we had to change a few things, so we stepped some of them back, but we loved Valence’s ideas, and it was so hard to step back from this look!

Luckily, the final look at Alexander isn’t too far from the earlier concept, and it just dials up the awesome to 11.  There’s plenty more polish in place, from the cloth portions of the garment, to the arm guards, and even the blades.

That completes our look at Alexander, but we still have one more character to show off that Valence sent our way, and then after that, we’ve got plenty of other ideas that we’re trying to work with him for.  Cross your fingers for us!

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Valence started us off with a couple of basic sketches to get the shape right, and get a roundabout idea of what Grohl’s equipment would be.  We had only seen his head before, so we didn’t really have the greatest idea of how the final piece would look, but you’ll notice that even in the second rough sketch, we could still see the orc cleric’s glasses!

This next step was another relatively iterative step on our way to finalizing Grohl’s look.  There weren’t too many changes here, but you’ll notice one of the two avenues we could go down was a little more flowy than the other.

Ultimately, we ended up going with the less billowy of the two options, just because it’s hard being an adventure when your robe gets stuck in stuff all the time.  After that, Valence moved us toward more detailed measures.  Our initial look at Grohl was him in his early college days, when he moonlighted as a model.

In all honesty, it was just that as Valence was working on new iterations of the character, he started looking as though he was aging up.  Sometimes that’s just the way it happens, and it ended up being a cool experience here.  In the next version of Grohl, you can see he seems more focused on his books, and his hair looks a little less “frosted tip” than before.

Then in our final version of the artwork, you can see that we lightened the hair again, and he seemed to age up even more.  That’s probably in tandem with the added glasses, of course.

Well, that about wraps us up for this look at the character.  We still have more D&D stuff to show you, but in the meantime, don’t forget that we’re releasing Tellest brand battlemaps these days.  You can find beautiful jumbo-sized game pad versions on the Tellest Etsy, or if you just want a digital version, you can find those on our Patreon.

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Valence started us off with a pose sketch that makes Pikeldorf look pretty heroic.  By the time this art was being crafted, our dwarven ranger was already doing some pretty interesting stuff in the campaign, like hanging off a lighthouse with a grappling hook to gather intel on the party’s enemies.  It was fitting to have this confident, almost arrogant look to Pikeldorf.

Now this next step isn’t Pikeldorf eating a super mushroom and growing bigger.  It’s just part of Lance’s process to get more details into the character.  You can now better see that there is a crossbow in our ranger’s hand, and that he wears a cloak, and has a few tufts of fur in opportune places in his outfit.  We don’t outright say it anywhere in his backstory, I don’t believe, but I think that Pikeldorf is at least secondarily related to the dwarves of Clan Thunderfury, as his greatest enemies are harpies.  Those warmer furs sort of imply that he may indeed be from a colder climate.

The earlier sketches don’t quite show as much beardiness as this latest focus.  Matthew was already in the process of shaving his curly locks, so he and Pikeldorf look fairly similar here.  We also see the color scheme a bit better as well.  He definitely looks the part of a ranger, even with his small stature.  But Pikeldorf has shown time and again that tough, hardy heroes come in small packages!

At this point, we were certainly making our way toward the end of our journey of bringing Pikeldorf to life.  Some of the big changes we see here are some more details on the crossbow and the grappling hook (each of my characters who were part of session zero received some “lite” artifacts that they can use one per session that make for some pretty cool RP scenarios).  We also see some polish on the rest of his attire, and a slight change to his beard.  Matthew has a bit more of a bushy beard, and we wanted Pikeldorf to sort of mimic that.

And then here we have it, the final version of Pikeldorf, brought to life.  Valence’s interpretation of Pikedorf was absolutely amazing, and Matthew was so happy with it.  It’s going to be interesting to see where we go with Pikeldorf in the campaign, especially now that he has another dwarven character to bounce off of.  Being able to see these heroes in all their glory goes a long way to bring them to life in new and exciting ways.

We’ll be back in a few weeks with another of Lance’s interpretations of our characters.  Be on the lookout!

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First up, Lance prepared us with a few sketches that showed the general shape and form of the character.  You’ll see a quick slideshow below that gives us some basics, as well as the beginning stages of Anaria’s attire.

Once we moved forward a little bit, we got a bit more of an idea of what Anaria looked like in the color scheme.  We were lucky in that we had some work done on the character’s heads before, so we already knew the basic color scheme and the like.

Valence gave us the option to move forward with or without a hood.  For a while, we were going to have both options available, but that idea became untenable, as it was a lot of extra work for the artist, even from this point.  We ultimately decided to go for the hooded version, but Valence still had to build Anaria up without it to get a proper idea of the shape.

We were also given the opportunity to choose whether the hood would be present at all, but we opted to keep the hood, as that one captured the magical essence that we were hoping for with Anaria.

Valence knew exactly what we wanted from an attire standpoint then, and it was then completely up to him to polish the fabric, add the light and shadows, and basically just bring Anaria to life in his wonderful style.

In this final version of the artwork, you can see just how lively Valence’s work was for us.  Anaria had never felt so alive, and it was great to see her fully formed.  Rhianna was very pleased with the artwork, and we knew that we had a great thing going with Valence.

There were still a few other champions that Cora sent along to Versali-Virai (and that our party met there) that we needed to see illustrated, and Valence did not disappoint.  More on them later though!

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