Fan Art in Progress!

I've gone a bit slack at updating this lately as I've either been doodling or doing musical! It's  a little after 3 in the morning now and I've just arrived home from the musical which I left for sometime after 6 this evening! That should give a bit of an idea of the time it takes up when its on =D Last night of it tomorrow though so I hope to keep this more up to date for the rest of the summer! ^_^

WARNING!!: From this point onwards the post gets very nerdy! Continue reading at own risk!!!

I am currently working on some fan art in an attempt to get better at drawing and painting and such! It will be a World of Warcraft themed fan art and it will be base on one of my very own characters in the game! My Forsaken undead mage!

This is what said forsaken mage looks like in game :)

I want to try and theme the picture around the class itself and the history of the forsaken. So what is there to know about both of those things?

A mage is a spellcaster and master of 3 schools of magic. Arcane, Frost and Fire! In game you choose to specialize in one of these 3 schools but you have access to the spells from the others aswell. A mage deals high amounts of damage while controlling its enemies from a distance! It even has spells to turn its enemies into sheep/rabbits/penguins for a short period of time!

I'd like to get a sense of the elements it controls in my picture, however what I'd most like to get across is a sense of the Forsaken's history as a people!

A Brief Lore Lesson!

In their former lives, before the grasps of undeath, the Forsaken were the living breathing residents of the human kingdom of Lordaeron. This was until they were betrayed by a prince of their kingdom which resulted in their deaths. They were then risen into undeath and bound to serve the will of the very ones responsible for slaying them. This was to be their eternal destiny were it not for another being who shared a similar fate to them.

The ruins of the Lordaeron. The Forsaken now live in the sewers beneath their former home.

Lady Sylvanas, the Banshee Queen, once a high elf in life, was also bound to serve the same master's as the Forsaken. In a moment of weakness, Sylvanas was able to break free of his will and managed to free the forsaken also. Doing this returned many memories the Forsaken had about their past lives and granted them their free will. This however would not be the end of their torment.

A statue of Sylvanas and an example of a Forsaken style building.

Their bodies were now rotten and decayed. Bones often protruded from their abdomens and some of them were even missing limbs (which some would replace with the limbs off corpses). Humans saw them as nothing more then the mindless undead they once were during their slavery, it mattered not that they retained their memories or free will or that they had died in defence of their human kingdom. They were shunned by a race they died protecting, cast out by loved ones, forsaken by society.

The Forsaken pledged themselves to their saviour, Lady Sylvanas. With her, they worked to create an existence free from the living who would have them destroyed. 

"Forsaken culture is strange, a perverse combination of the lives they once knew as mortals and the mindless slavery they experience in the Scourge, colored by white-hot rage towards the Lich King and an almost equally intense devotion to their queen. Never sleeping, eating or falling ill, abandoned by those they once loved, the Forsaken have a brutal set of priorities."   - http://www.wowwiki.com/Forsaken

I love how tragic their history is and how misunderstood the origins of the race are. At first glance they seem like mindless undead but there is much more to them then that.

And lastly to end this post I have two quick photoshops I did with a model editor and some screen shots in game to try get some ideas from. This is literally just cutting and pasting images together and adding effects as a quick way of trying to get some concepts! All credits for the below (and above) images goes to the Blizzard artist's who work on World of Warcraft!

My mage over a forest effected by arcane magic.

Same model of my mage used again. Corpse of Sylvaas is at his feet (she isnt dead by lore however!) and the floor shows the  designs on the ground of Lordaeron throne room!

And for anyone wondering, yes this is another cookie post ^_^ And no you will never see said cookies but at least you have the pleasure of knowing you deserve cookies!