greetings, adopted offspring that only knows me as a bunch of pixels,

i'm back again with a bit of a bigger piece ^-^
idk... recently i've just been in the mood to draw and design more of my paladin boiis... and as some of you may remember, i drew this thing here, in..... february? i think at least.... maybe it was march....

but that's not the point. basically i just thought, that i still like the drawings, but since my style has developed since then, i thought that i might as well draw them all again. and since i have a better laptop now, that allows me to actually draw all the characters in one file, meaning i don't have to draw them all seperately and then kinda fix the pngs together until it looks like a group picture.

so i looked at the list of my trainees from that year and decided to just... go ahead and draw bothanar with their friends, since i already drew cev and ru pretty often as smol trainees... at least compared to my kids that didn't even have a design yet ^-^""

the main plan for this project is, to draw collections of trainees in their close friend groups, within their trainee class, and then draw them all, after graduating and becoming fully fledged paladins ^-^
that's also, why there is a "part 1" in the title >w<

my basic ideas for the poses were, to show their personalities and reactions, if they were to take a picture together.
bothanar is central here, which is why i put them in the middle. the rest was just a puzzle of poses, ending up with this mess of a sketch:

and after that... i went ahead and drew each of the characters from right to left.

the first one was gathrodor from the shadowdance clan. i also decided to render him completely before continuing with the other four, to give me the shading colours, as well as the direction of the light.
now... gathrodor is a special case in the paladins. his hometown got burnt down in an ambush by the knights of the night, whilst he was still an infant. when the paladins arrived too late to stabilize the situation, they searched through the rubble for anything they could salvage... including this barely still living baby.
gathrodor then grew up in paladin quarters, being brought up by several older paladins, that didn't go on missions as often as the young ones, and had mostly office-jobs. from a very young age, he then ran around, bothering his dads to tell them about adventures and teach him how to fight, meaning that he was already pretty knowledgeable, when he finally reached the age to be sent to HQ for the official training.
since he is already integrated into the paladins, he also was the only trainee, to not use a dragon to fly, but instead a hoverboard-like thingy, that one of his dads made him for his birthday, since his dragon is about the size of a cat and has the flying abilities of a chicken...

next was uilosson from the frosthill clan. now... since i barely ever talk about the frosthill/snowflake clan.... here's a quick explanation. the ice-clans are the only ones, to have two clans, within the same nation. this has developed due to the difficult conditions in it's icy deserts of snow, and mountains. the frosthill clan, usually live out in the frost. they are a nomad clan, that wanders from place to place, mainly hunting and fishing to survive. the snowflake on the other hand, have adapted to the life in the mountains, building large cities and using greenhouses for agriculture.
this is also why uilosson looks quite a bit different from silagwend, when it comes to ethnicity, as they are from those different clans ^-^"

ANYWAYS.... uilosson is a pretty relaxed and lazy lad, who lost his arm due to an accident in training. his main hobbies are procrastination, sleeping and panic-studying before exams, and he wanted to join the paladins, to finally leave the "boring" nomad tribes behind, as they grew pretty sick of the endless, pure white at some point.

then we have bothanar..... if you're curious about them, just go back to january/february/march sometime.... i drew them a few times before and talked about their backstory there >w<

then there's heledhanar bloodhound. being the nation of passion, beauty and war, every bloodhound must join the army for a certain amount of years, after graduating from school. the only exception being, if you enlist into another military service instead.
so following into the footsteps of his elder brother mistion, he joined the paladins, to dodge the conscription.
generally he is a determined and serious lad, who is the type of person to need a "warning sarcasm" sign, whenever someone uses irony/sarcasm. he is extremely close with his family, especially with his two elder brothers, one of which is a paladin, the other one working as a servant/body-guard in a noble household.

and lastly we have bronwechanar angelwing. one of bronwechanars elder brothers was married to a paladin, meaning that during family gatherings, bronwechanar got to hear all the tales and stories, his brother in law had to tell. after finishing school and not really knowing what to do with his life, he decided to give the paladin try-outs a shot, actually managing to get admitted into training.
he is mentally still a child, cannot survive five minutes without telling a bad joke and get's really really excited, when it comes to sweets or little mechanical gadgets.

so yeah... that was a rough overview of them, so here's another WIP, where you get to see finished gathrodor and a lot of dudes in flat colours without arms and/or hands :)

so yeah!

when it came to expressions, i wanted to show their personalities.

gathrodor doesn't like photographs at all, so i wanted to make him look pretty stern, stiff and uncomfortable.
uilosson probably missed the moment when the photo was taken, getting distracted by charcoal on gathrodors shoulder.
bothanar is chilling there, not being allowed to stop floofing little charcoal, since the small dragon has surprisingly sharp teeth and claws, that violently grab bothanars hand, whenever they want to retreat.
heledhanar is his serious self, wrapping his arms around bronwechanar and bothanar, since he kind of established himself as the parent-figure to keep those two rascals in check.
and bronwechanar is mucking around as always, sadly not being allowed to make a stupid face, since this was for the graduation year book, which is supposed to actually be a pretty official thing.... well, he begged to differ either way.

so yeah! had a ton of fun drawing them all together for once, and figuring all their palettes out, depending on where they're from >w<

Uhhhhh......... i don't really have anything left to say here, so... i guess i'll just finish the chapter then, eh?

yeah! hope you guys liked to hear more about my trainees ^-^

as i said, i'm also working on drawing them all as adults, so if you're more curious about any of them, just wait until they've got their own chapter out, where i hopefully will go more in depth about their family, personality and experiences >w<

>>pats all my kiddos<<

so until then... take care of yourselves, feel cuddled and patted, and remember, that breaks are productive as well :)

>>wraps in blanket and gives some hot chocolate<<