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Todays drawing is of Mariel Gullwhacker from the Redwall book "Mariel of Redwall". For this piece I tried to loosely base it off of the scene on the cover of the audiobook, which by the way is done by the artist Sean Rubin who does most of the audiobooks cover art. I tried to take aspects of Mr.Rubins coverart and convert them into a solo piece, so I cut down the characters present to just Mariel but kept the setting being somewhere in the depths of Gabool's fortress, because I cut the characters down to just Mariel I had to have her holding her gullwhacker as well as the torch. I also tried to base my Mariel design off of Mr.Rubin's design for her, hence the pseudo hair she has (I don't normally give Redwall characters hair). In this piece I really wanted to do some more experimenting with simple backgrounds and light sources. Normally my lighting comes from some undefined source off screen but in this piece I really tried to emphasize that the light was coming off of Mariels torch. In the end I think I went through like 5 or 6 different iterations of the lighting, at first I hadn't draw the fire but knew where it was and tried shading her like I normally would, then I drew the fire and did a simple shade on the background and realized Mariel needed more intense shading. After that I realised she needed another iteration of intense shading and then I gave her an edge shadow on the parts of her furthest away from the torch to really hammer in the point that she's being illuminated by the torch. I do think I could have done better with the shading, the face is definitely a flat area shade wise, but I'm happy with the overall results. As I said before the background was also a quick practice in simple backgrounds, lotta straight lines for bricks interrupted by a window with and iron bar in the top corner. I added cracks to the bricks to imply age but I think I still need work in that area as the cracks look fine but not quite as good as I'd like them too. I also added water running down the top of the ceiling. I was tempted to add light coming from the window in a beam like fashion but decided against it as I wasn't confident on my ability to pull off 2 light sources, so I settle for an ambient glow from the window which if you notice does cast a shadow coming from the iron bar, granted its a very small shadow near the edge of the screen so its not super noticeable. The fire itself was also super fun to draw and I think I'm getting a handle on drawing fire. Anyway this piece was super fun and I'm very happy with the end result, while I don't think it's as good as my Slagar drawing I do think it came out very well and can say I'm satisfied with it.

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