When Death Comes

This was done in March of 2014.

So I’m taking a class about print publishing right now, and for our last project, we have to design a 30-page (or thereabouts) book. I decided I didn’t want to do journals or family histories or cookbooks like everybody else and chose my own writing to “publish.” The only problem is we’re required to have 5 accompanying pictures (plus a cover, YAY XP), and I have to have the text and pictures ready to work on by Monday, which means they all need to be written, formatted, and drawn properly. I’ve been madly drawing pictures for the past few days, and I thought I’d share them because I put so much effort into them.

I have a total of seven oneshots I’m using for the book, but only five of them have pictures, so I’m only going to talk about the five. I’d feel bad “publishing” fanfiction, so I wanted to focus on my original writing (the very last story is the only exception to this, but it’s vague enough that you can’t tell it’s fanfiction unless you’re in the fandom).

This corresponds the first chapter of my novel When Death Comes, featuring the dragon Akara from A Birthing Day Gift. This chapter introduces my villain and my three main characters: Dalenar (pictured above), Jinira, and Akara. For our purposes, we’ll just focus on Dalenar’s section. Dalenar is a merman prince who finds court stuffy and uninteresting, so he’s gone out to bask in the noon sun with the fish. Later, his elder brother finds him and takes him back to the palace.

I’d like to consider myself a pretty good merpeople artist by now because I tend to draw them frequently. But male anatomy still plagues me, so I had to look up references to get his torso just right (it still doesn’t look right, but I tried).
Dalenar’s hair still looks ridiculously odd to me, but I quit. At least he sorta looks male despite his long hair aslkdjf
FISH. Although they were a bit of a pain to draw, they were fun to color
I used a bit of a tutorial for the rocks, but then I messed around and did whatever I wanted with them, but I kinda like the way they turned out.
Again, didn’t want to use brushes for stuff, so I did the sand by hand
I used a tutorial for the ocean, and I really like the way it came out I used that tutorial for another picture once, but I like the way it looks here much better.
So far, I am proud of this one most

So yeah. Let me know what you think! Also, normally I leave my pictures with their full size so you can see everything, but these are MASSIVE, so if you want to see the full picture, you’ll have to download it.

Dalenar, When Death Comes, Art © kelekiahshadya 
Refs
Anatomy: Destiel Mermen
Fish: imgs.tuts.dragoart.com/how-to-…
Water: Water Background Tutorial
Rocks: Lucky's Rock Tutorial