Boss Battle!

Dear Muse, I have other WIPs to finish. Please stop making me start new drawings. Love, Hex.

The "little" pinkish dragon at the top is Xeari, the main character of one of my oldest stories ever, Tales of Kenah. She definitely does not start off nearly this badass. And she's actually at least 2m tall, or nearly 7 feet. The original backstory was that she used to be human, then she got warped onto this planet named Kenah and transformed into a mutant dragon. She wasn't exactly happy about this. Not sure how much I like this idea anymore, so I'm thinking on that.

The big shadowy dragon is currently named Cymrae, but that's up for debate now as I feel somewhat more self-conscious about stealing the Welsh word for Welsh (which is Cymraeg, if you want to be specific) now that I'm in the UK. I don't think he's particularly Welsh. Originally I drew him waaay too big and then I had to shrink him down, which is why his lines are so light and thin in this even though you can't tell this zoomed out. He's still supposed to be huge. Just... well, ToK is meant to be a webcomic, and you gotta fit things into panels, y'know? I'll probably make a size comparison chart of my various dragon characters later.

Cym is the reason Xeari got warped to Kenah in the original story; there's a sort of prescribed lifespan for all dragons and when a dragon is born, another one dies and gives its soul to the new dragon. But when Cym was meant to die he refused, and (for reasons I haven't figured out) he survived the struggle with the reaper. So now the balance is all fucked up and someone's got to go put him in his place. Cue the Chosen One, Xeari. Cym is old, even for a dragon. Dragons tend to live to be at least a thousand or two, but even after maturing they grow slowly over time, so he's a pretty big guy for his species (different dragon species come in different sizes). I have lots of interesting concepts floating around in my head regarding the whole soul-balance thing, but I guess it'd be considered spoilers so I shall say nothing here.

I drew Xeari and her companions in black and white for the longest time before picking colours, at which point anything I put on them seemed wrong. So I arbitrarily picked a dull red and now she looks weird in anything else. It's something of a happy coincidence that this forces me to make Cym a complementary green, like classic dragons of old, but they don't call him the Dark Dragon for nothing. When I paint this properly I want him to be all shadowy-wispy and stuff. This version is just a sketch and a colour mock-up.

The background is just whatever, really. Been inspired by various fantasy paintings and their misty-foggy backgrounds, though I'll probably have to go hunt some down later to do this properly as it's all from my (admittedly terrible) memory.

They speak Welsh in Argentina?!

- Hex

TDKYLID 3

After some deliberation, I have decided to keep the colour backgrounds and add colour to the drawings. And vary my lineart. I'm not sure about shading yet; my varied lineart tends to work better with a cel-shaded style but I'm actually better at more realistic shading... on the other hand, learning and practice and stuff! We'll see.

I don't know why I'm doing them one at a time. I had ideas for Derek's colours by the time I was finishing up his lines, so I guess I just wanted to get those down... and it continued from there. Keeps me interested, I suppose. I am kind of trying to make each person's shirt complement their background. I bet Levi's going to look weird in red...

Left to right: Derek, Ethan, Lexy, Levi, Gale, Ter, Charon

- Hex

TDKYLID 2

Now with clothes! And colours I may or may not keep. Once I realized there were seven of them, my natural reaction was to try to fit them to colours. Red, green, and purple had already been chosen earlier, and I was pretty sure about the light blue. Let's not get into "how many / what colours are in a rainbow" arguments right now. I needed seven, so I'm using a more purple and and a more cyan blue.

Left to right: Derek, Ethan, Lexy, Levi, Gale, Ter, Charon

- Hex

Turaco Dragon

A turaco-bird-based dragon for a dear friend's birthday! here's some progress screenshots, the final, and some close-ups.

And no, I'm not going to be posting a million times a day on a regular basis. I'm just on a roll lately.

- Hex

TDKYLID

Bit of a thing I'm working on lately. It was going to be more of a single piece with all these people in it, but I couldn't figure out how I wanted it so I decided they would have boxes instead. As you may have noticed, there is a lot of wonky and Lexy's being a bum as usual.

These are a bunch of characters of mine who show up in a couple of related stories. It's not that Charon's short. It's just that everyone is stupidly tall |8

Left to right: Derek, Ethan, Lexy, Levi, Gale, Ter, Charon

- Hex

Hello! Also, spriting.

So this morning I was talking to a friend who swore he was following my blog. "Impossible," said I, "for a blog is not a thing that I have." (This is paraphrased.)

I proceeded to mend this travesty.

There is a thing that I am working on as I speak (although not precisely as I speak, considering I can't type and draw on the same computer at the same time, and let's face it, I'm not even talking anyway), a WIP (work in progress) of which I shall post just as soon as I implement this one change I suddenly realized needed doing. In the meantime, you can have a gander at the various pixel art work I've done. Most of it is for the species concept subforum of Dragon Cave, a collectibles site where you catch and raise dragons from egg to adult. These are projects in which collaborators create sprites for male and female adults, male and female hatchlings, an ungendered hatchling, and an egg. The process goes from sketch to spriteline to colour, with critique and redlining all the way along. The species are also required to have behavioural descriptions.

I'm only going to post work that is purely mine or that has only had minor edits (if it's been sketched by someone else, I'm leaving it out; if it's been coloured by someone else, I'll just post the WIP stage). Because I don't shade pixel art much, the vast majority of this will be lines or flat colours only. Clicking on the images will bring you to their respective forum topics, although I forget whether or not you need to be registered to see them. (The ones without links aren't for concepts, just for my own practice and personal projects.)

Note that all of these have flaws that gradually get ironed out in the production process. I'll probably post my sketches another time.







You can call me Hexephra, or just Hex. I'm too lazy to design/whatever a blog properly right now, so I'll probably build on it gradually, adding links to my other internet dwellings now and then. And stuff. I don't know. Organization is boring.

- Hex