New year new art!

Through most of my artistic journey, I've found I respond well to certain styles and motifs, as any artist does. But nothing has quite hit all my buttons as Dragon Age Inquisition's character tarot cards. They are messy, elegant, graphic, and full of arcane designs and icons. They are gorgeous. I don't usually do fan-art, but I was just so gobsmacked by it all that I've done a kind of fan-style piece.

If you haven't enjoyed the latest Dragon Age addition, here's a link to an imgur album with a decent collection of the images: http://imgur.com/a/nZQqC

I believe the artists responsible for the cards were: Matt Rhodes, Nick Thornborrow, Casper Konefal and Ramil Sunga. This seems a partial list but that's as far as my research has found.

In any case, here's my piece, about 10 hours over the course of three days I think?

As it is with most of my work, the impetus was a tabletop game that I've been setting up to play in. The DM asked the group of us players to google up some character art to use as tokens on roll20. I decided to use this opportunity to make my own character art of course. 

The iconography is pretty simplistic, he's a character very proud of his strength, there's elements calling out his weapon of choice and that he is a horse-rider. Specifically he is part of the Hellriders of the Forgotten Realms setting. 

I feel like I have to apologize for the gratuitous naked torso. I always make the mistake of shaping out the muscle forms with the intent to put armor over it all. But then I'm just so pleased with myself over an expertly painting torso that I can't make myself paint in some armor. I mean, the character is very proud of his body and its part of his characterization. Hm--yes, its all done in the name of characterization.