This year, I plan to keep busy in between commissions by working on some projects of my own.
The first is something that I started a couple of years ago, but didn’t finish because I began to think there was no need for it. It will be a PDF collection of various first-level D&D characters, all of them women. I got this idea when I thought of my own response to gaming art, especially the D&D art that I grew up around, which often featured highly sexualised images of women in highly improbable armour, and how this contributes to the idea of tabletop gaming as a hobby exclusive to men. Later, after working on my character designs for a while, I began to think that this was silly. Tabletop gaming, after all, has an enormous female following. Many of the women I know play some sort of tabletop role-playing game and/or run their own. I abandoned the project for a while, thinking it was unnecessary, but recently I have spoken to more than one woman who finds D&D interesting but a bit off-putting for the same reasons that I mentioned above. So I’m starting again.
I don’t know yet how many characters will be featured in this PDF, but I hope to represent each of the major races and classes of D&D. Each character will have a name and a story, an illustration, and a first-level character sheet. Below, you can see one of the characters I designed two years ago and have redrawn, a Dwarf Fighter. I’ll post more about this project as it continues.
The second project is newer and a bit more tentative, but it’s one that I’ve been considering for a while: a webcomic retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in the early 1800s. Despite its problems, Beauty and the Beast has always been my favourite fairy tale (and my favourite Disney movie). I especially love retellings that attempt to address its problems, and I would love to attempt my own.
I have the story mapped out already, and a good idea of what the characters will be like and how they’ll look, but I say the project is “tentative” because I’m not much of a writer, and I know how overwhelming webcomics can be. Still, I’m excited to try, so we’ll see how it goes!
Here is a preview of the two main characters and their setting. I think I’ll want to edit this drawing later and add even more roses. I doubt the comic itself will be coloured in this style, because it was very time consuming!
I’ll have more to post very soon about a previous commission that I wasn’t able to show until now. I’m also very close to being ready to change the look of the site a bit!
Vanessa Ellis 