Wolf-Speaker finished

The finished Daine. It looks pretty different from the WIP version for something I only spent another couple of hours on. I added her forearm of course, and the bird-and-animal elements are a whole extra layer (or several?). But it's also amazing how much difference adding colour and tone to a face can change it.

Unlike often, my Alanna pic for instance, I didn't change anything about the face with the paint layer. I only wanted to add a thin wash of tone, not enough to fully conceal any cover any misplaced pen lines, so I stuck to what I'd drawn with he acrylics. But the colour brings volume to the skin, and expression to the eyes and mouth that give the face a different dynamic. More vulnerable that I'd expected, perhaps, less guarded. She lost much of the imperiousness I intended to give her, as Daine at the height of her power and self-posession.

And I could have worked on and regained that, but I was reluctant to overwork the paint layer, and furthermore I like how she looks like she's listening.

I placed the two birds and the monkey to look like they're whispering to her, and I think her slightly abstracted, attentive expression sells the idea that there's communication going on.

Wolf-Speaker WIP

I quite like how this is looking at the moment, so thought I'd post it in case I later screw it up in any way...

Following on from my Alanna picture, it's Veralidaine Sarrasri (Daine) from the next series Tamora Pierce wrote, The Immortals. The series, and the character were always my favourite of Pierce's Tortall stories - possibly simply because I read them first and it is via them I formed my first impression of the world. But Daine does have an awful lot of undeniably awesome moments. Pierce also steers skilfully clear of Mary-Sue-dom despite having a friend-to-all-living-creatures, unknowingly-attractive, awesomely powerful god-child as her protagonist. Daine is endearingly down-to-earth, and often cross and grumpy. This is also the series where Pierce's attention to authentic detail really kicks in. Daine's interactions with animals feel real because Pierce has so thoroughly researched the biology, habits and personalities of the animals she writes about. Apparently Daine first came to Pierce when she was watching a David Attenborough documentary, and the influence of that serious and sharp-eyed attitude to natural history is apparent throughout the series.

What you see so far is a line drawing of brown paper, the skin and hair with an initial layer of acrylic colour. The feathers on her (headdress? Actual head, semi-transformed?) are real feathers. As is evident from previous work, I love working onto brown paper in any case, but somehow brown does seem to be the essential colour I always associate with The Immortals. Perhaps because Daine's magic manifests as copper, perhaps because I associate the colour brown with nature and animals, perhaps simply because the first of the gorgeous covers for the series by David 'awesome' Wyatt is rather brown.

I want to surround her with animals and animal motifs, naturally - maybe some painted but largely found images. Which is difficult as I have not yet found many of the right sort, and at the right size.

Alanna! Oops.

Yup, I took precious time away from finishing Christmas Open House stuff to complete my Alanna of Trebond and Olau sketchy.

Tamora Pierce seems to have fallen out of fashion in Britain, and you don't see her stuff about as much as you did when I was a teen. I gather she's still very popular in America - a status she very much deserves. I can't say enough nice things about Tammy P. In a genre full of flat, generic characters and poor Middle Earth-rip-off settings, Tammy has always managed to create books that are full of life and humour and convincing detail. It's not that her stories are necessarily founded on ideas that have never been explored before - in fact, her two first series in particular are founded on almost folkloric bases: the girl who disguises herself as a boy to train for knighthood; the girl who can talk to animals etc.

It's that she fills these stories with characters who you care about - who can be petty and stupid sometimes, and who have fun, and who interact with each other like people really interact. If she's writing about a girl who runs with wolves, you can be sure that Tammy's done her homework and that the behaviour of the animals is based on solid research. As she has set more and more books in Tortall the land and its neighbouring countries have grown in depth and subtlety, and changed with the passage of the books timeline, in the way the best fantasy lands do. There's something of Terry Pratchett about Tammy's world-building. She's another writer who stops to think about how a magic-influened, pseudo-medieval city would actually work.

('The Healing In The Vine', one her none-Tortall books, must be pretty unique amongst fantasy novels, in that the meat of the story is the outbreak of an epidemic in the city, and follows the efforts of the characters to fight the disease and find a cure - it's a drama of research-magic. It's also a great read.)

But back to the point: this is Alanna, star of Tamora Piere's first quartet of novels. Actually, this series came second in my personal Tammy P chart to 'The Immortals' (the one with the talking-to-animals-magic) but that is not to say I didn't read and reread the Alanna stories and still turn to them now for some serious comfort-reading.

I'm happy with the picture, though I weakened and made Alanna look more feminine that I originally intended. I had meant for her to be about age 15 here, and thereby still disguised as a boy. But it works as well to think of this being fully-knighted Alanna, and so openly female. Despite myself, it goes against the grain to make a girl look too boyish. I do the same thing with Maladict/a from Terry Pratchett's 'Monstrous Regiment' - in my head she's androgynous, but she comes out looking no more convincingly male than a twenties flapper: boyish in haircut, but of extremely feminine face and figure.