A picture paints a thousand words; a picture with context can say a lot about a game; but explanations of the random sketches of an artist-gamer can say the most of all. In this series, I look at the just-had-to-draw-them images distilled from my games: what they are, what they mean, why they demanded drawing, and what techniques and in-jokes went into them.
It started with a revelation, as I stepped off of the trolley one morning early this year, having just finished a graphic novel in which one existing world and set of characters was adapted to an entirely different narrative style. One could tell, style or no style, who these people were—and this seemed important, somehow. I’ve nowhere near the style of the numerous gamer comic writers who can draw the characters such that you can tell exactly who is whose PC (fortunately, my NPCs don’t need this anyway); to be honest, I hadn’t even done all that much work without a reference.
But the idea of iconic images of my characters was just too strong to ignore, and in the process I learned that maybe I don’t utterly need a reference after all. By the time the bus I was supposed to connect with had picked me up, I was halfway through the line-art for this.
This is Tsubame, a high-frequency NPC from my Exalted game. Her role has changed a lot over the course of time, but the important parts are still the same: she’s very old, very canny, highly connected politically, and extremely manipulative. This picture, in particular, was inspired by a conversation I’d had within a couple of weeks of when I started drawing. I’d been testing out my characteristic image exercise on one of my friends, and this was one of the images that had come up—she’s just heard that her boss is retiring and one of his positions, one that everyone had thought was all but officially hers, is going to her greatest rival; all around her people are dropping their glasses in shock, talking loudly, and otherwise reacting quite strongly, while—well, suffice it to say that her calm is deliberate and not just a result of my still getting the hang of facial expressions.
The group later found out that her calm was justified. The position her rival had just acquired was the nominal head of a deliberating body of her political enemies—she could be overruled by a majority, and that majority was already used to listening to Tsubame. In short, all she’d lost out on was the title, and in exchange she’d gotten another way to play with said political enemy.
Artist’s notes:
While I sometimes sneak a little extra meaning or imagery into my work, this for the most part wasn’t one of those times, and the most symbolism I get out of this is the swallow and koi motif on her bodice. Swallows have been a running element for Tsubame from her inception: she was designed in response to one player’s past life backstory including a tragic not-quite-romance, in which her prior incarnation, one Verdant Swallow by name, was the third wheel. As a result, when I first introduced her way back in the sixth session, I hastily cast about for names and ended up with, well, the Japanese word for swallow. The koi, on the other hand, is a (very, very indirect) reference to her being nicknamed “The Dragon”, which in turn draws equally from her temperamental nature and from her involvement with the Realm; I mostly included it for balance’s sake.
From a technical standpoint, though, my favorite part of this picture was my experiment with the upturned glasses on the table. Before applying any other color, I colored each whole glass with the white colored pencil; this created the washed-out effect when I went through with actual color on the second pass. I also tried to up the distortion effect by changing the angle of the bands of color suggesting the table behind the glasses. Just to finish off the effect, I avoided inking the outlines, the way I do on everything else.
