I’ve been really fortunate to do a series of character portraits for FFXIV game characters. This one features two Miquo’te mages casting some spells (cat like beings from FFXIV).

This commission was a little different in that the client had really definite ideas about what he wanted, even sending through a rough sketch of the poses he wanted the characters in. This made the process really straight forward as I knew exactly what he wanted - there was no guessing about costumes or ideas, we could go straight to the sketch phase.

From an artistic POV, I did flip the female character so that it made it a little more compositionally tidy, but it mostly matches their ideas.

If you’re ever worried about offending an artist by sending through rough sketches, or embarrassed by what we might think of your drawings, don’t be! We are visual people ourselves so three marks on a page often means more than a paragraph of writing. It’s a great way of conveying your thoughts, and you’re hiring us to do the painting so we know that you may not be a trained artist so we are not going to critique your anatomy!

The client provided game screenshots, some costume screenshots, colours he wanted for the magic and the poses. I got to play with the background so that it loosely represented something from the general landscape. I still spent a number of hours hunting for the costumes and weapons to understand them from more than a single view.

For further information about my commissions, check out my Sales and Services/ Commission page