Night Elf Guardian Druid

I finished a new illustration this week. It’s an updated version of an older picture of my Night Elf Druid from World of Warcraft. The original picture was for the Illustration Friday theme of Disguise. For me, the word fits druids very well, as they shift from one form to another. I decided to redraw it because I wanted to update my avatar on my guilds discord.

Sketch of a Night Elf Druid holding a bear mask.

The sketch is really rough and I wasn’t too worried about finishing her arm or lower body because I was planning on cropping it into a circle. I also was pretty lazy about scanning and just took a photo with my phone and airdropped it to my computer to start coloring.

Flat colors of a Night Elf Druid holding a bear mask.

I always start the coloring process in Illustrator. For this particular style, I don’t use lines so everything is just flat shapes on top of one another. I try to work from the background to foreground, to make it easier when I move into Photoshop. Once I have everything colored I convert all paths into layers and export as a PSD.

Flat Gradient

Noise filter applied

Layer set to Multiply with a lowered Opacity

Once in Photoshop I go through each layer, name it and separate them into folders by type (skin, shirt, hair, etc). From there I go through each later and add a second layer on top that starts as a gradient. I add noise to that gradient to get the texture. I do this to a second layer on top for the shading.

You can see her eye color changed between Illustrator and Photoshop. For a long time, I’d been coloring them a yellow color, which I must have eye-dropped from a screenshot. When doing some research into eye-glow I found this page about different eye types for WoW races. By accident, I’d been coloring my character with a super rare eye color, so I fixed that.

Let me know what you think or if you have any questions about the process.