Czar-Aran Chacter Sketch

I'm vastly more pleased with how this sketch turned out than the one I did of Zel-Taren, however this was my second crack at digital drawing. I'll probably go back and edit the old one now. Maybe next I'll have to try an full scene illustration... eek.

Czar-Aran ascended to the throne of Ten'al-taria shortly before the begining of the events of Principatus. He was raised by his father, the former Czar, to believe that all Hylians were greedy, power mongers who horde the power of the gods for themselves. For this reason, he blames Hyrule for his own kingdom's misfortunes.

Check out this sketch on deviantArt.com here
Read the story on fanfiction.net here

Hyrule World Map Explained

Since I'm writing a story that takes place in the Ocarina of Time world, I'm trying to stay as true to the "map" of the game as I can. The world I'm trying to describe, however, is much larger than that of the game so I drew this map to help sort things out. I like to think of Principatus' Hyrule as being a more expansive version of Ocarina of Time with a dash of Twilight Princess.

I figure Hyrule has a pretty sophisticated governing system for the quasi-medieval-ness of it all, so I took the concept of having four provinces from Twilight Princess (I even kept the names) and applied it the the terrain of Ocarina of Time. The only big changes I made to the OoT map (besides adding more settlements) was to move Lon Lon Ranch of being smack dab in the middle of Hyrule Field off to the side near the farming village of Ashleigh and add Gerudo Mesa- the boarder between Hyrule and Ten'al-Taria. In case you can't read my handwriting, here's a breakdown of what each province contains...

1. Faron Province: like Twilight Princess it's the southern most province. It encompasses the villages of Ordon and Ashleigh with Ordon being the larger of the two (And where the Duke and Duchess live), as well as the Lost Woods (Kokiri Village, Sacred Forest Meadow)

2. Eldin Province: also like Twilight Princess houses Death Mountain and Kakariko Village, but because I wanted to keep everything in it's general OoT location, Hyrule Castle and Castle Town are in Eldin instead of Lanayru (Lanayru has enough as it is)

3. Lanayru Province: Zora's River (Domain, Fountain), Village of Euell, Kenton (military town), Remington, and Lake Hylia, the largest of the four provinces, encompasses the river which is controlled by the Zora

4. Gerudo Province: pretty striaght forward- Gerudo Valley, Gerudo Fortress, Haunted Wasteland, Desert Collossus, Gerudo Mesa 

I think next I'll do a post about how I set up the court/ government system of Hyrule...

Taren Character Sketch

Character sketch for Zel-Taren, an OC from my fan fiction story Principatus. This was my first experience with digital painting and airbrushing which took a while to get the hang of. I'm going to do a sketch of Aran next (another OC character) but hopefully it won't be as difficult :/

New Toys!!!

I finally caved and bought my first digital drawing pad... yeah!!! My new toy is the main reason it's taken me two weeks to finish Chapter IV of Principatus, well that and the fact I actually need to complete my online classes before the fall semester starts.

Anyway, to practice with my new digital drawing pad I did some character sketches for Principatus. The cloaked dude at the top is definitely not a good guy, but I'm not going to say exactly who it is... that's my shameless ploy to get people to actually read the story first :)

I'm currently working with Sketchbook Pro on my computer because I could get it free from the Apple Store Online but many people I know use Painter so I'm probably going to look into it, but for free software I've had very few complaints so far with Sketchbook. Only now I just need more practice, and by more practice I mean A LOT more practice with painting and airbrushing... if anyone with digital art skills has tips definitely let me know them!