Lekka Meyren

Really enjoyed it. I feel like you captured some of the essence behind many of the FF songs both in composition and vocals.

More artwork! This batch includes two studies of lekka, and an attempt at drawing a friends character; E'lari in a slightly different style. The chief difference is how I work; on the E'lari piece I did a sketch and then drew final lines atop that immediately. Normally I merely develop a sketch on a single layer until I am happy with it.

I think I generally agree with a lot of the sentiment going on here. Since this is an MMO, I feel like killing off your character serves less purpose than it would in say... a long-term DnD game. Other people you interact with have their own personal stories, and though you probably have some overarching story that binds you, it's not as focused an affair. So I guess killing off a character mostly makes sense if you need to move on from it in some way; but others will still be persisting. That said, Lekka is totally the kind of lady who would jump in front of a blade for a friend. Which is why I'm a little careful about initiating any kind of combat RP. Would have to be with only people I trust or she'd just go and get herself severely injured.

I've occasionally included "racial language" in my RP, not as full conversational sentences; but rather just "" or similar. And I feel like that's a nice solution for those whose characters are either from more tribal/distant areas I.e didn't grow up in one of the big eorzean cities; or just for a little flavour in that likely only other roegadyn would understand the word meaning. (Though I'd assume inflection in swearing works much like it does in all earth languages, you can tell when someone's angry/in pain.) Could also work fine if your character speaks more of this language than the common folk of Eorzea would. You wouldn't speak it unless you were speaking to someone who didn't understand common eorzean, but dropping a word here and there makes sense from a bilingual perspective. (Personally speak a few languages, and I always find myself struggling for the word in one language, but knowing it in others.)

Lekka was in her PLD gear, and was looking handsomely knightly, so I thought I might as well..

Pretty! I really need to get on learning how to paint.

More updates! Recently got my hands on a Companion2, so I started doing more doodling while mobile and wanted to test what it could handle. Thus I worked on the illustration some more, as well as some random doodlies. (non-ref doodles, that's why they're a bit odd.)

Thanks for the compliments! I think overbearingly the best compliments I get are the ones from others who feel inspired to work more. It is so hard and it takes a lot of active effort; But when you let others inspire you and share your own art in return, it does get easier! :moogle: I guess it's that aspect of feeling like your art had some purpose beyond blind practice. Hope you can get back to it if you really want to. Oh, and here's another little doodle I initially only put on Twitter.

Another little update! Two doodles and some progress on the illustration work; excuse my noob painting skills. In other news I've started on the comic project surrounding Lekka, and hope to get that done within a few months.

I tend to have an idea of who my character is; where my character is in life; and where I want her to end up. I don't think I really "GM" it so much, but I definitely direct it through how I tell the story. Recently I ran a little Arc that was supposed to set her up a little, affirm her reasons for staying with the company she is at and introduce some of the conflict in her life. And because I love it if people pick up on a hook and add to the story; this ended up including medical roleplay, interpersonal drama and just so much character development. I suppose this mostly works if you have characters surrounding you whose players love to jump at ideas and take it their own way; and there's a certain level of trust required. But it was so much fun! Suddenly Lekka has relationships to a lot of characters in ways I could have never predicted; some she feels indebted to, others she dislikes. And all of that happened rather organically because people found hooks in my story that fit their characters.

Sometimes I've had scenes between two people where it took a few minutes between each response; But I have a rather verbose style when others around me also do.. I think it's just a thing to get used to; and I think in many cases people will be happy to "wait" for you to act, particularly if you are currently being talked to or acted with. It's also definitely something I had a lot more of before though, when I first came to balmung I was really unconfident in how to play my character and interact with people around me; but I guess having gotten to know her better through her interaction with others, it kinda comes easier? Like now she can be a little rude at times to people she has only just met, simply because it would be her natural reaction. When I started out I was more of a polite stick.

Finished lineart for the Lekka piece: Drew S'hayla. (In flailing painterly) Drew Ihrie(Work doodle) And drew an RPC forum member from the Thread of reference:

...Deal with it?

Welcome! Not on Gilgamesh myself, but I hope you have a wonderful time here on rpc

Funny to look back at the first little portrait I did of Lekka now, the change is quite big! But that's why I wanted to spend some serious time studying how to draw her; because subtleties are hard you guys.

Haha! Yeah I think maybe I made it a tiny bit too long-lasting. But I wanted to show off the difference in a single image rather than side-by-side. It's always a little funny when a Gif trolls you though.

Thank you! At the moment I'm doing some more illustration style work, thought I could post this little gif I made of improving the sketch.

The furniture designers of Eorzea face a rather interesting challenge in their work. One which caused Lekka to endure some introspection recently. She came into a new establishment, and took a seat only to be instantly confounded by her place in this world. What was even happening here in this land of the lilliputt.

I -might- be recovering from the flu, or the ibuprofen finally kicked in. Either way I had the energy and patience to do a little homage to Akiri and Tia's wedding.

I have influenza again, so I've been struggling to really have the focus to sit down and draw. But tonight I managed a little at least, started out as a head-pose study and ended up being a kinda younger version of Lekka? Teenage Lekka, if you will. Turned out kinda cute.

Yet again I shall flailingly try to help a little. Firstly I think your eyes are placed a little high. Optimally most eyes are at roughly half the heads height, can vary and I think I remember the "correct" proportions being just below half, but not 100% sure on that. I also think you are positioning the eyes a little wrong based on the direction of the head? - This depends on my understanding of your position though, as I tried to scribble at the bottom of the picture I'll attach, you can have that sideways pose both upwards and downwards and It would change positioning of eyes a bit. You've got the rule 'o thumb I usually use for ears down, so I'll hand you that! They're roughly in line with eyes, you're also trying to accentuate eye socket/skull shape on which is nice. Your chin at the moment kind of throws off your mouth/nose positioning. The chin looks to be far more in profile, and would probably have to be pulled back a little. (the mouth would possibly disappear slightly like I've tried to indicate) Nose is too long, really. But again that ties into having the eyes too high and effectively killing any forehead the character would have. Some people have rather short noses, others can have longer ones. The thing is that all these features can be changed slightly and it'll still look good, as long as it's all consistent. I really reccomend trying to study a little just to study. It's tempting to try to draw "good art" from the beginning, and that has a lot of value too - But learning how to construct and "work out" how to place things in a specific position is really valuable. - Adding to that, use reference often. I am terrible at it myself, but it is imperative to use reference to build up a mental library of reference.

Not entirely happy with this. I wanted to capture a scene where Lekka holds one of her would-be attackers off the ground in a chokehold... But with reference imagery being hard to find I had to try to work a lot from memory, and that always ends up with subpar results. Ah well. May finish it some other day.

Cool to see you posting here. I'll be following along for sure :tonberry:

Honestly the only advice I can give you is to draw. Your work will look like shit for a long time, but you'll learn that it's a lot easier for you to see what's wrong as you improve. The process is in part just learning the actual mechanics of laying down lines and ink - And learning how to stylize or how to render something realistically. Like I don't even think I'm all that good right now, it's a constant struggle for improvement, and that never changes. What does change is your ability to do stuff though. And you have to put the time in.

Uhm. I'd say a year and a bit. Granted in that year I drew every single day of the year, so 365 terrible doodles or actual work on illustration or art. ( Also studies ) If you want some proof of this, and also quite the timeline of change; This is October 2013 - I was not drawing much back then. And this is January of 2014. I started drawing every day on the 1st of Jan Edit: You can flick through Archive by month in the bottom box along the right sidebar "The Archive".