GIMP

Tortle Wizard (October 2025)

Champion of the Raven Queen, this tortle bears many features of his patron. The combination a pitch-black feathery cloak and ages-worn stature give the impression of a vulture. His great effect on the weave is evident, to any who can sense it. The silver ring on his hand emanates strong telepathic energy. Though calm and of old age, his arms are beyond muscular and his thick clawed hands can clearly serve as dangerous weapons.

Alright that little lore snippet did not turn out great, but I'm pretty proud of this (digital) drawing! I spent the better part of a rainy Saturday drawing this guy instead of doing the things I actually should be doing (such as working on my thesis).

Inspiration

The drawing is directly based on a 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons character I made the day before. I've made many characters for D&D and have drawn a couple of them, but I'm definitely most proud of this one (so far). A large part of the inspiration is thanks to the DM who put me up with the prompt of a level 15 character who happens to be a champion of the Raven Queen. Now it is not every day that you get to make (and play) a 15th level character so that's a lot of fun. However, I would only get to play the character for one session, so I didn't want to go too crazy. The last time I played a high-level session I was impressed with the crazy stuff a wizard gets to do, so thought I'd give that a try and simply play a level 15 wizard. The Raven Queen is all about preserving a certain fate, the fate of death. Though undeniably edgy, she's hardly evil and mostly very lawful. Similarly my character dislikes and avoids violence, yet as a guardian against undeath often ends up in violent situations. My original inspiration was make a heavily armored wizard, who operates in the heat of combat (so, war magic subclass).

Together with the DM we got to what I think is a pretty awesome concept. Champions of the Raven Queen get chosen upon their death, after which they serve her in their death. So what if this character wasn't a wizard in life, but a fighter? He would have lived in ancient ancient times, before Karsus's Folly. At that time, magic was much more prevalent and powerful. So, by nature he is a warrior, yet by current capabilities, a wizard.

Unfortunately, I could not get a full wizard with heavy-armor proficiency together, which would have made for an awesome Goliath. However, the shell of Tortle is a nice alternative, and when necessary they can use their claws. I look forward to casting a powerful concentration spell like antimagic field to then retreat into my shell. Character Sheet

Using GIMP

I am very much a GIMP noob, so I pretty much only used basic functions and messed up a couple times, but it wasn't too bad. I've used it occasionally for a pretty long time, but it feels like I always forget completely how it works every time I use it again. My workflow was pretty much to first make a couple drafts for the shape and silhouette and then make layers with the basic shapes of the character for each element. In this process I started with the head and limbs, which would all have to be shaded similarly and take be in the foreground. Drawing the character I pretty much only used a basic round brush and locked alpha when shading. Only at the end when creating the magic pulse effect for the ring did I use other brushes. Pretty much the only other features I used was some basic transformations and color correction. The color correction I did play around with quite a bit actually. Mostly because I wanted his skin to be a particular shade of quite desaturated green to signify his age, while still making other colors pop.

I tried to be pretty consistent while using layers. Only the cloak caused some issues where there is no logical position for it in the layer ordering, but that was not to big of an issue. Unfortunately at some point I must have accidentally created a layer with everything on it (including a bad looking background). At this point I was almost done and made too many changes to this layer to go back, so I just ran with that layer and attempt to remove the background. This was not a pleasant experience and you can still see some bits at the edges where this lighter background first was.

Despite this, I do plan to keep using GIMP in the future. To me it is very valuable that it is open source software and I am confident it is plenty capable for most of my projects in the future.

Drawing

I started with the face, which went decent enough for me to get the motivation to finish the piece, but I do think that right now it is one of the weaker areas as I got more comfortable over time. Particularly the mouth and snout could be a bit better, but I'm happy with the overall shape and the neck.

Usually, when I draw, I don't draw characters, especially humans I find difficult and that is because I'm silly and don't really know or practice anatomy nor use references. When you draw people, you immediately know it when something is off anatomy-wise. Of course this is no human, yet I feel like I did learn something about anatomy. At least, I learned something about making it look somewhat convincing (I learned nothing about how anatomy actually works, again, no references).

A little tangent about references

Just to be clear, I don't think it is cool to not use references or something. I actually think it is usually quite stupid. In this case it was just one of those moments (which you can not rely on) where I had everything pretty much pictured in my had from the start and really wanted to play around with getting just that on the screen. I should also articulate that I don't think that makes for better art. Especially at my skill-level it is bad for quality. The only reason I didn't use references is that I started with no expectations and solely drew for my own enjoyment in the act of drawing.

What helped in this case is that I could obfuscate where limbs connect to the body. What helps even more is that is probably kinda weird for bipedal turtle anyway :). The shape of the shell is pretty much left implied by the cloak and shadow. In my mind it is one of those really round and knobbly turtle shells, similar to that of the Galápagos tortoise.

I'm most proud of how the hands and arms turned out. I can confidently say I've never even been nearly successful in drawing hands. They are not perfect and a bit bulky here, but the bulkiness was part of the concept, so I'm quite proud.

By extent it is a little unfortunate how the magic pulse from the ring makes the hands area look a bit messy. This effect generally did not exactly pan out how I wanted it to, but that is fine. I really wanted it to be very clear that the ring is magical, otherwise there is little indicating his magical nature.

First Post!

Heyo! This is my first post on this website. Clearly it is wayyy to long and I spent way too much time writing it. Next time I'll be trying to keep the rambling contained. It is better to try to learn a single thing well from a "project" of this scope, than to spend loads of time writing down every single thought. But hey! I'm here to learn. Whoever you are, thank you reading!