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At last, that promised Character Study! I realized just now that I actually haven't featured any Character Studies on DeviantArt yet, so this is the first here! I'll catch you guys up with some new, fresh drawings of the ones featured on Facebook a few years back.

This was a sudden picture I started traditionally when I got my newest how-to-draw artbook on fantasy characters. I've always struggled with humans, and this book has really helped. This pose was a featured simple shape base in the book that I literally started using because it was an interesting design, and I could use it as a reference. But as I drew, it quickly turned into this character, because it was a pose he would use. I did end up completely coloring that initial picture traditionally, but I wasn't entirely happy enough with it to post. I also put his scars over the wrong eye and realized it too late (I get left and right mixed up while drawing far too often.) So, I threw the picture into FireAlpaca and came out with this, which I'm much happier with.

Erade Softpaws (pronounced E-raid) is a character out of my series Niaku, showing up in the first book. I don't want to give TOO much on his history, because that's meant to be learned in the series. His surname is homage to the fact his family often dabbled in thievery. Erade was no exception, though his time as a thief has come to end in recent years. He's an exceptional cook, and very good at misdirection and traveling in silence--the skills he learned as a thief have uses elsewhere. Chipper by nature, Erade is usually seen with a crooked smirk, ready with a joke to make his friends smile. He usually likes to chew on different cooking herbs, like basil, thyme or parsley, a habit he developed as a child when his mother taught him to do it to try to get him to sit still--he was a bit of a restless child.
Weapons wise, he prefers knives, especially dual knives. He also uses a tanto, which he's holding in this picture, and throwing knives or shuriken. For armor, it's dark-dyed hard leather, with his knee, elbow and shoulder pads plated with metal.
Other unique quirks about him is that he's basically blind without his glasses; all he sees are essentially blobs of color, no depth or distance to the world. To combat that, he began, from a young age, training to fight and live blind, using a bandana to block his sight. He has exceptional hearing because of it, his senses tuned differently from other people, since he doesn't rely on his sight as much. In this picture, he was likely surprised by a sound and spun into attack mode, hence why his bandana is still around his neck.

I tried to keep the picture simple. I wanted to do something more, maybe show a scene out of one of the books, but my schedule did not allow that. Maybe someday! Still, it was a good picture; I tried to practice with more of a back-lit shading style for something different. I still don't know how to draw weapons that well, and swords like katanas and tantos I still struggle with, though his came out far better than I thought.

Description
At last, that promised Character Study! I realized just now that I actually haven't featured any Character Studies on DeviantArt yet, so this is the first here! I'll catch you guys up with some new, fresh drawings of the ones featured on Facebook a few years back.

This was a sudden picture I started traditionally when I got my newest how-to-draw artbook on fantasy characters. I've always struggled with humans, and this book has really helped. This pose was a featured simple shape base in the book that I literally started using because it was an interesting design, and I could use it as a reference. But as I drew, it quickly turned into this character, because it was a pose he would use. I did end up completely coloring that initial picture traditionally, but I wasn't entirely happy enough with it to post. I also put his scars over the wrong eye and realized it too late (I get left and right mixed up while drawing far too often.) So, I threw the picture into FireAlpaca and came out with this, which I'm much happier with.

Erade Softpaws (pronounced E-raid) is a character out of my series Niaku, showing up in the first book. I don't want to give TOO much on his history, because that's meant to be learned in the series. His surname is homage to the fact his family often dabbled in thievery. Erade was no exception, though his time as a thief has come to end in recent years. He's an exceptional cook, and very good at misdirection and traveling in silence--the skills he learned as a thief have uses elsewhere. Chipper by nature, Erade is usually seen with a crooked smirk, ready with a joke to make his friends smile. He usually likes to chew on different cooking herbs, like basil, thyme or parsley, a habit he developed as a child when his mother taught him to do it to try to get him to sit still--he was a bit of a restless child.
Weapons wise, he prefers knives, especially dual knives. He also uses a tanto, which he's holding in this picture, and throwing knives or shuriken. For armor, it's dark-dyed hard leather, with his knee, elbow and shoulder pads plated with metal.
Other unique quirks about him is that he's basically blind without his glasses; all he sees are essentially blobs of color, no depth or distance to the world. To combat that, he began, from a young age, training to fight and live blind, using a bandana to block his sight. He has exceptional hearing because of it, his senses tuned differently from other people, since he doesn't rely on his sight as much. In this picture, he was likely surprised by a sound and spun into attack mode, hence why his bandana is still around his neck.

I tried to keep the picture simple. I wanted to do something more, maybe show a scene out of one of the books, but my schedule did not allow that. Maybe someday! Still, it was a good picture; I tried to practice with more of a back-lit shading style for something different. I still don't know how to draw weapons that well, and swords like katanas and tantos I still struggle with, though his came out far better than I thought.