Na'veen, the villainous villainess

(Full-viewing this picture makes it look a whole lot nicer...)

Wow, this is the first significant picture that I've finished in ages! I think the wait was worth it though... The theme of this picture, in case you can't tell just by looking at it, is 'darkness'. Na'veen Del'bren'shazoren is my slightly insane drow necromancer, and I wanted to draw a picture that showed just how dangerous she has the potential to be.

A little while back, I realized that I was dissatisfied with my artwork. I felt like I had been using the same style for far too long on the same few characters. I decided to mix things up a bit by changing my art style to force my characters to 'grow up'. As you can see, I'm still big on 'cute', but I think I can also pull off 'mature' to a fair extent.

While I was at it, I figured I might as well come up with a new dragon concept. If you've seen the pictures of Flykyr in my gallery, you'd know that my dragons are very simple and cute. I thought it'd be nice to try something different for a change. I think it came out fairly well.

Redesigning Na'veen's outfit was a huge step forward for me. She's always had the same dress, and it's always been dark blue or purple with gold trim. Switching to black and red was surprisingly refreshing. I also really wanted to make her eyes red, but since she's always had blue eyes, I went for something of a mix of the two. It doesn't look too bad, does it?

I had a lot of fun with the various effects - the flame was especially fun to work with. I tried my hardest to make a decent background, but I failed, so I ended up using an EQ2 screenshot. Don't hate me for that, k? Someday I'd love to be able to make my own backgrounds, but now doesn't seem to be the time for it.

I've discovered that I have a mild obsession with drawing fingernails on my characters. o_o; It never mattered to me before, but I suddenly find myself feeling disturbed if I don't add them.

Drawn with mechanical pencil, outlined in pen, colored in Photoshop. Probably took me about ten hours total.