A picture paints a thousand words; a picture with context can say a lot about a game; but explanations of the random sketches of an artist-gamer can say the most of all. In this series, I look at the just-had-to-draw-them images distilled from my games: what they are, what they mean, why they demanded drawing, and what techniques and in-jokes went into them.

The final fight in my friend’s short-term Dresden Files RPG game was one of those ones that just made me want to draw—and interestingly, the three pictures that popped out of it were all in functionally different styles. This one was the second of the three; while in the end, it isn’t the one I put the most work into (unless you count making a special trip out to buy watercolors one evening), it’s certainly the one for which I put the most effort into technique and mood.

Coo.

This is Arthur. He’s a British werepigeon, played by my boyfriend, who’d gotten the idea from his annoyance with the general portfolio for were-creatures. “They’re always either carnivores, or things with claws and fangs,” he’d commented, before suggesting that one thing he really wanted to see was a were-kiwi. Originally, the pigeon (a were-kiwi of any nationality in Britain was a bit improbable even for this group) was my backup character concept; when I settled on the bibliomancy-theme that eventually coalesced into Aisling, he took up the feathers and added a bit of spellcasting to boot. Our two characters tend to keep each other out of trouble half the time and exploit synergy the other half; it’s great fun.

More specifically, this is Arthur the werepigeon posing dramatically as he unleashes (offscreen) a booby trap involving a lot of holy water through the gargoyles on the church we were holed up in on a dark god-thing flying upward towards his position. I’m pretty sure it was the most visually evocative moment of the entire battle, so when I found myself bored in front of a computer with an itchy sketchbook finger, it’s what resulted.

Arthur here was drawn from a combination of two reference pictures: one for the face and one, when I realized I needed a pigeon on a flat surface rather than a wire, for his posture and body markings. The rest of the picture ended up as a series of experiments, seeing if I could actually do new techniques. Watercolor in the background—the first time I’d actually touched watercolor paints since I was in elementary school. Use of partially erased #2 pencil as a darkener on the feathers, when none of my grays would work. And then there was the gargoyle—the texture there is what happens when I rest the picture against a brick, color it with a standard #2 pencil, and then color over that with a white colored pencil. (White colored pencil, it seems, is my answer to everything.)