#reiker

When Khadija Ayyub, Sword of the Sabbat, met Kurt König, it was love at first sight. She agreed to Embrace him so that they could spend their eternity together, but after a few years something went wrong...

P  e  n  u  m  b  r  a  l

Super-late piece for Inktober - yeah, am aware that I’m posting late but...

a) I’m in the final year of a medical degree so didn’t line until 30th Oct and didn’t start my shading until near midnight on 31st Oct, and

b) I had to move accommodation and pack my scanner away for a while.

(bottom version is fully grayscale and the top version is still showing the slight blue-colouration from the imperfect black of the pen - which do you guys prefer?)

Anyway, ballpoint pen (said pen is featured in the photo of the image, felt like doing one of those pictures too since everyone is doing them these days and I felt like trying out this bandwagon - don’t think it quite works with my art, but oh well) drawing of Reiker.

For those of you unfamiliar with him or his kind - Reiker is a male Krovendrakk - my own species of partly alien vertebrate apex-predator, of the North-Germanic Kårstatt clan ( “clan” is equivalent to “subspecies/race” in Krovens). If you’re curious - see my deviantArt gallery folder for more details on Krovens (I also plan on re-doing the species reference before too long and have the base-sketches done, also am re-making the 3D Kroven sculpt in Sculptris).

Damn, I’m so rusty with ballpoints (URGH, SO MESSY), also I virtually never do black fur in ballpoint, or short fur - so this was a big challenge indeed and I wanted to try to make it work, for Reiker... I fell short, rather a LOT, but I guess I hopefully learned a bit while making this. And thankfully I saved the original sketch before I shaded him so I still have that - if anyone’s interested I can link you the sketch. 

I’ve always deeply associated Reiker with dark nights and stars rising over bleak mountains - and especially eclipses, as some of you may have noticed. So here, I had the idea to draw him with a kind of inverted parhelion behind him, but I decided to leave out the sun behind in the centre of the image as I didn’t want it to clutter the drawing in ballpoint, also a bit like Reiker himself is the “black sun” here...

Also pictured in rough, stylised form behind him is the Dawnspear - “his” mountain. I’ve seen Reiker himself much more clearly recently in terms of smaller details of his features, and actually I see more of Adolphus in him than before, if only subtly. Also I’ve drawn him with a slight ridge of longer fur just at the front of his chest here - something I didn’t see him with until that time I saw him when on the way back from Tromsdalstinden... so here he’s drawn a bit like in that moment, quite some way in the future. I know Diira had a fringe of fur here, though more pronounced in her case, also I think his pointy manubrium is usually still typically visible through it since it’s not as dense as his mane - just here he’s kinda backlit and the fur is moving a bit in the wind. I don’t know if maybe he develops this fur-ridge later in life, I wonder even if it’s some kind of delayed-development that takes a long time to surface because of his earlier life, or maybe he just appeared with it that once in that one vision. Eh...

Also finally have his scars pretty much down - old version was way too fine and cluttered, now the scars are simpler but also thicker and a bit more jagged/harsh in appearance. His face is also a lot deeper than previous drawings (but still narrow! Reiker has a “hatchet head” 8′D), finally his pointy chin is clearer too - and his high and rather arched cheekbones (prominent and sturdy but fairly flat from the front - unlike Adi’s wiiiide cheekbones).

Still not happy with a lot of how his face turned out here, but I blame my shading and ballpoint rustiness - but as said, at least I still have the original sketch.

Also toying with the idea of turning this into a coloured and more detailed digital drawing in future too...

The Masque of the Red Death