I've been playing D&D with my housemates since November 2019 when we were still separated by most of a country. My character, Allywick, was just a lost little gnome girl who thought she was a failure of a druid until she met her girlfriend and the rest of her adventuring party. There's a lot of me in Allywick, and I've learned a lot about myself while playing her. She's been such a constant and important presence in both my life and my art that it sometimes hurts to remember she's entirely fictional. Fortunately, we're only 12th level out of 20 for this campaign, and then we went and decided to make a comic about it. So she's likely to be a big part of my life for the next decade at least.
As should be pretty apparent, this is a repaint of a piece I did back in 2020. Since then in game, Allywick's gotten a pretty significant outfit change, and an upcoming event is going to inspire her to chop off all the hair she's been growing for a decade. I wanted to paint the portrait after that moment, which involved looking for a new hairstyle that fit her. Turns out I stumbled upon the right look pretty early on, as is often the case, but I like to do a few extras to make sure I don't like something else better.
I put a lot of focus on the hair because the fuzz on the side is such a particular texture and I wanted it to contrast sharply with the longer hair. Color wise, I wanted to go bold to make up for the lack of color in the original painting.