Shhh, its a Secret.

Lord of the Docks: Hatchling 1.1

Danny discovers his daughter is Exalted

Distance 0.5 has arrived

We finally get to the moment of Exaltation

Taylor takes her Second Breath and becomes a Water Aspect Dragon Blooded

On a dark night when Robert is contemplating doing bad things to find and destroy Shroud he gets a call. The daughter of his dead sister lives on a world where powers are tied to trauma, and she just got hers.

The reason he hates Shroud is that he took his family from him. He’s not going to let that happen again.

OR

Taylor gets powers but knows she has someone to turn to to get help with them. She just doesn’t expect to be moving across the country and to a whole new world when she makes the call.

Featuring my favourite character Dani Phantom

Who actually calls herself Dani in this AU. I hate the whole Ellie thing in a bunch of fanfics.

I guess.

To be clear I was happy with the first image that I delivered. Or as happy as I get with anything of that style. I don’t feel like I’m good at it and I did make it as good as I could get it. This isn’t meant as a replacement or a better piece of art.

But

I joined this challenge to encourage myself to practice making art and there was almost a month left in the challenge. So I decided to make another image. One that was in a different style. A style that I don’t practice as often as I should considering how much more I like how it looks. I never know how to start doing things like it though.

So @shiftingpath here is a picture of Glittering Blade to go with the one of Shifting Path Traveller that I posted before.

As before I find myself more skilled at playing with light and shadow using the digital art than I am with anything else. This style however plays to that. Because it is all setting up the flat colours to have the shadows play on. Oddly this is more subtle than I normally play the shadows, instead I normally do hard shadows with straight lines, rather than the soft shadows here.

If you are wondering why I didn’t do the face… same reason I didn’t do the fingers. They aren’t super important to the image. I could have added lips or eyes but every time I do with this style it feels off. It can work with glasses or scars but regular eyes just feel off. The nose turned out surprisingly well honestly.

Oh and because I did the other two I decided to do a quick one for Grey Flame.

I did the first thing that came to mind a month ago which was a wanted poster, that any Night Caste should have at some point.

I got @shiftingpath themself for my secret santa so I drew Shifting Path Traveler

I know I am a bit out of practice but part of volunteering for this was to help get back into practice. For some reason even though I didn’t retain the skills at actual figure drawing I remembered all of my tricks for shadows and lighting, even though it has been longer since I actually practiced those.

They mentioned that Shifting Path Traveler was a crafter and among the many available crafts my mind got stuck on the textile aspect of it so I drew him patching a hole in a blanket.

And my Exalted+Worm crossover just updated.

Lord of the Docks

Is a crossover story having Danny Hebert actually be Peleps Da’Neril, a dynastic dragonblooded from creation who was brought to earth bet by Dr. Haywire’s experiments and is now stranded. This is the story of his daughter Taylor Hebert figuring out what it means to be exalted on a world where parahumans are the standard for powered individuals.

So I am joining the Exalted Secret Santa this year, and I’ll star by apologizing to whoever I get because I am a little out of practice when it comes to art. This is a good way to force me draw though so I will take it. I look forward to not only the art of my character but the art of everyone else’s as well. There should be more Exalted art in the world. It is a cool setting.

I mention outfits and colours of outfits in all of these. Feel free to change them up, these are just what I generally picture them in/draw them in.

Now onto the characters I have on offer.

Notably I am not playing any of these. I am a forever GM who has to be the GM of even systems I am not super familiar with if I want the chance to play them.

Hush

Nameless Chosen of Secrets of Unknown Origins

Hush is probably the character of mine you have seen the most of because she is my avatar. Also I have posted the most art of her. I don’t expect you to have run into anything I have done at all but she is the one with the most out there. I initially made her for an exalted art challenge (let’s be real I did not finish it) and just kinda fell in love with the design.

Let’s go through what physical descriptors I have of her.

She is a tall woman.

She has straight dark red hair that goes down to her mid back

She has green eyes that literally sparkle with stars in them

She is lean with a martial artist’s build

Though I seem to have failed in some of my images I was aiming for an east asian skin tone

She wears a green robe with white accents and a dark blue (almost navy) belt

I know that isn’t a lot but it is what I normally go off of when I am drawing or creating a model for her. I actually kind of care more about the actions she is doing normally. She is a bit of a trickster and somehow always knows she is being watched and looks right back at the hidden viewer.

So let’s go over some of the less physical descriptors that will help keep her in character.

No one actually knows her name, Hush/Hush Now are nicknames that people have given her because she refuses to tell anyone. Nara-O knows her name but won’t tell anyone because they only know it from looking it up in their records. Fitting for a Chosen of Secrets.

Her main position within the Heavenly Bureaucracy is “Junior Assistant to the Assistant Librarian’s Assistant” and her main job when not off doing something for the Maidens is reshelving books that other people left lying around. Not even books that have been returned, just ones on tables that were left alone.

She has a habit of stealing names and epithets and passing them off as her own for a while just to get people to stop asking for her real name

She is trans (though very few know this) and has a tendency to specifically steal the dead names of other trans and non-binary people

Despite having the build of a martial artist no one has ever seen her in a fight or practicing martial arts

Her anima is dark green and accompanied by the sound of whispers. At the iconic level the pillar of light is wrapped in hundreds of unfurling scrolls and the whispers raise in volume, still unintelligible but always seeming to whisper your deepest secrets to the world (the person hearing the whispers always interprets them as being their secrets)

Cynis? Teela / Hair of Falling Leaves

Beautiful Dragonblooded with a Mysterious Dynastic Father

Cynis Teela didn’t start as an Exalted character but she definitely fits as one. She was originally a D&D character, specifically an elf dragon ascendant monk, who worked as a travelling minstrel and dancer. (Yes you can have musicians and dancers that aren’t bards in D&D.) Her backstory though is what made her fit into Exalted, her mother is/was a courtesan inspired by those of the Apothecary Diaries. The kind where you don’t necessarily have sex with them but just spend time to be in the presence of a pretty lady. In Exalted and on the Blessed Isle that basically means the establishment is owned by the Cynis. Hair of Falling Leaves was born initially as a form of black mail against the one who got her mother pregnant, something useful the Cynis could keep in their back pocket. Then she Exalted and the proprietor of the establishment decided having another dragonblooded was more useful to the house than the blackmail. Though her father is the one paying for her education.

Speaking of education that brings us to the first thing about Cynis? Teela that is notable. I made her (for Exalted) as a character I would play if I ever got into a Dragonblooded Secondary School game. She is young. She is just joining a secondary school, though I don’t know which one, and she does not know who her father is. Not knowing who her father is was supposed to even be a possible subplot. All I know about the father is that he is from a house where it would actually be a scandal that he was with a prostitute and got her pregnant.

Now onto her physical description

She is relatively average for a girl her age (teenager) and grows to be about 5’4”

She is beautiful, she gets her looks from her mother and they both have Appearance 5

Her feature are sharp and angular, reminiscent of the elf she was originally

She has a gymnast’s build and leans into that flexibility

Her eyes are a light green colour

I have put her in all sorts of outfits with all sorts of colours, though I do tend to stick to either house Cynis colours (Green and Gold) or a mainly black outfit with some kind of bright contrast. Often the contrast goest with her hair so oranges and reds.

You’ll note that I did not bring up her hair colour in the physical description. That is because it deserves more than a bullet point. I waffle on what her hair colour should be quite often. The original D&D character had “hair the colour of falling leaves” that literally changed colour as it grew being yellow/green near the ends, red in the middle, and brown near the roots. But for Exalted I need her to have red hair for the connection to her father. On the other hand the shifting colorus is a really cool concept and if she is a wood aspect (I never settled on an aspect, I wanted to talk to the GM about it first, in case they had an idea about what house her father should be from) it could work as the sign that she is wood aspected. You can draw it either way, what ever works better.

Now for some less physical descriptors

She is a musician and dancer, specifically she was being trained to take a similar position to her mother’s in the brothel

She is skilled at Dreaming Pearl Courtesan style. The style was designed for courtesans to defend themselves and act as discreet bodyguards so she was training in it as a mortal. Becoming a dragon just made her better at it.

Her goal is to master all 5 elemental dragon styles and the probably the 5 dragon style when it is released

Sorry for basically all of the images being Heroforge. Despite her being one of my front runners for wanting art of her I realized I had never drawn her myself so I did a quick drawing of her last night.

Fia the Thousand Eyed Moth

Scarred and Elegant Sapphire Sovereign of Uluiru

I bet you were expecting another pale red head here weren’t you. I honestly did not realize how similar the previous 2 characters were before I started posting this. Fia is however completely different. She is a Sovereign of Uluiru. I made her for a game that I didn’t end up being a part of but I fell in love with the character anyway. The game was set in Chiascuro and Fia was going there specifically to study the glass. Not just because she is a Sorcerer but because she is a gem cutter and crafter. Specifically she uses the Talisman of 10,000 eyes as her sorcerous initiation and she fully intends to make a similar tool just to prove that she can.

Unlike the other two sections I won’t just be doing a bullet point set for her physical description. I am first going to go over the scars that cover her body. Despite it never being shown to be the case in the art or represented in the descriptions of Sovereigns the painful process always brought Lichtenberg scars to my mind. So a prominent feature of FIa’s is the scars she received when she entered the Font of Glory. The left side of her face, all the way down her neck, and wrapping about the rest of her body (with more on the left side) are a massive interwoven set of Lichtenberg scars. These scars glow faintly with the blue of her anima when she uses essence and literally leak glowing essence when she is at higher anima level.

Now the rest of her physical description

She has very curly hair which dangles to one side because she shaves the left side of her head to leave all of the Lichtenberg scars visible

She bleaches and dies her hair blue, though she isn’t great at it making the colour uneven

As mentioned above she is covered head to toe in Lichtenberg scars

She has dark brown skin contrasted heavily by the white and blue of the Lichtenberg scars

Despite the scars she is amazingly beautiful, again Appearance 5

She is of average height

Her eyes are an icy blue

Though she is a sapphire sovereign and puts a lot of work into having a lot of blue in her aesthetic her favourite colour is purple and she wears a lot of it

Now onto the less physical aspects of Fia.

I mentioned she was a sorcerer and uses the Talisman of Ten Thousand Eyes as her initiation

Her control spell is where the ‘moth’ part of her epithet comes from because she has Death of Obsidian Butterflies as her control spell

I would not say she is obsessed with the beauty of gems but she is certainly fascinated by it and seeks it out in many ways. All the different ways she can cut gems and create beauty from them are interesting to her. That is why she went to Chiascuro, to study their famous glass and see if she could replicate it

She has made a study of architecture as well, but mainly in a perfunctory fashion so that she could study Geomancy.

More than just being a sorceress and gem crafter she is also a skilled merchant. Buying materials and selling gems, jewelry, gowns, and the like wherever she goes.

Edit: Forgot to mention that her anima is also butterfly related. Her iconic anima is a tornado of sapphire butterflies rising into the sky.

Week 3 of the #exaltedartchallenge is favourite spell, evocation, charm, knack etc. Last time I did this I did my actual favourite, or rather my favourite combo. I did the Solar charms to summon a horse then have it stand on top of a washing wire using your athletics. Which is honestly my favourite only for the visual it provides.

This time I’m doing them all around a Sidereal so I can’t really do the Solar charms. I will admit that I somewhat considered “cheating” in that I absolutely love the Martial Arts system and considered using one of those. It would even be appropriate for sid since they are set up for Martial Arts as a main component. But I wanted to stick to the theme, and if I have to choose a favourite Sidereal charms nothing beats Name Pilfering Practice. Not mechanically of course, I am sure there are better charms than it mechanically, but nothing hits the weird reality bending otherness of Sidereals to me more than the fact they can just pick pocket your name off of you. Why yes I do have strong associations with Celtic mythology and folklore why do you ask.

So I didn’t end up finishing this one. Just didn’t have enough time and got a bit too obsessive about the background. I only did flats, I might go back and finish the light/shadows at some point. Maybe fix the hair as well.

So I actually started an Exalted art challenge years ago with no intention of doing it in 30 days as just a way to keep in practice. When I saw someone starting it up again with a 4 week version on the Exalted Discord I decided to join in. This is the first challenge of PC or NPC so I did an image of the first character I did for the Exalted challenge last time. I can actually feel how out of practice I am with how poorly I ended up doing this (I fused a bunch of layers and then had to deal with the repercussions. So the light and shadows aren’t as nice as I would like.)