Dungeons and Dragons

I'm very new to the concept of Dungeons & Dragons. Although I'd heard of it, I'd never really seen a real game or the inner workings of a D&D session before. Luckily, a few of my classmates and I formed a group so we could play a campaign together.

One aspect of Dungeons & Dragons that I find incredibly fun is your player character. Although I'm an anxious person and therefore absolutely terrible at role play during the game, having the opportunity to create your own character from scratch and then develop them the more you play is fantastic. I created a Minotaur character in the monk class, and named him Taraak.

This relates to the character design project we did this year, too. I definitely found that creating a detailed backstory for the character before I began playing gave him so much more life, because you're aware of their motivations and how they would react to different scenarios that are happening in the world, and can adjust their appearance based on this.

Initially, I drew my character just so that the other players could understand what he looked like, as I didn't really have a solid idea of how I wanted him to look. But because your character is constantly facing different situations, they are constantly evolving. Their personalities, abilities and even appearance will be changing fairly regularly, which allows you to understand them more and more as you play, and figure out how exactly you want their design to look to fit the personality that shines through during a session.

What's also fun is that every session provides you with a plethora of new situations your character will face, whether just talking to another character, fighting enemies or doing something more complex. These situations can give you good inspiration for drawing, and the wide variety of the type of situation lets you create drawings that will be different and interesting every time.

Below you can see some sketches of Taraak from a few of the sessions. The first drawing I made of him is the coloured one. This one was the initial idea I had for him, but I wasn't 100% happy with it, especially the colours. Since he is very lovable but reclusive due to his past, I thought it would be good to give him a fringe that covers his eyes. As the saying goes, "the eyes are the window to the soul", so I didn't want the other characters to be able to see into his soul just yet.

As I mentioned, Dungeons & Dragons is a great source of inspiration for drawing characters, so I plan on using this to practice my drawing ability and hopefully create some lovely illustrations and animations of him in the future!