Shield

 This story is loosely based on the Grimm's fairytale of the 3 spinners: A lazy little girl gets picked up by a queen and is told to spin three whole rooms of flax into thread in three days, if she does it, she gets to marry the queen's son. If she can't...well they never really said there was any sort of consequence. She gets three old hags to  do it for her and she marries the prince. The end. I wasn't as interested in the story as I was interested in the 3 hag characters. They are horribly misshapen because they spin so much, and I thought there was a lot to work with those characters, and after I made my own story changes, Shield was born.

 Three incredibly sketchy grannies. I think Thor is my favorite though. In all the myths I've read he's described as not exactly being the sharpest crayon in the box and I wanted to represent that in how he disguised himself. What I love most about his design is the facial hair that he just couldn't manage to get rid of when he transformed.

 I had this idea that the troll queen would be colder than the frozen ground she walked on, causing the ground to fog up like dry ice. I didn't want to go with a fat ugly troll like in my first sketches. In my research on Norse myth, the trolls (or also called frost giants) were strong enough and advanced enough to stand on equal ground with the Norse gods themselves! they were colder than ice and lived in magnificent halls high up in the mountains. In one myth, the fertility god Freyr even fell in love with a troll at first sight! so I designed a more human looking troll queen. I had fun with her but I still think she could be better. Also I'd like to thank Nadine Pau for the lace brushes!

 I'm still playing with the troll castle.

If you look close, there are figures trapped in the ice. That's how my troll queen keeps her prisoners in the dungeon.

Ignore any atrocious spelling. They haven't invented a pencil with instant spell check yet. But this is how I normally solidify my ideas. I can't create a character and instantly pin down their life. I have way to many should-a, could-a, would-as'  knocking around in my brain box for that. So a lot of the time my sketches have notes all over them. For this project, I started drawing some heads for Keva and wound up nailing down the story instead.