Well, my darlings, I.......... um..... remember how I promised to more or less work on all the things I ought to draw for other people? Hahaha.... I decided to make a small "coloured sketch" of Gruithon instead.....

We all know that that obviously blew up and I ended up spending hours and hours on it...

Anyways! I never drew my child before, simply because it's a lot harder for me to kill off characters, when they have a face. And that's very much the case with Gruithon. But I'll get to his story and also death later on in the chapter.

So, the thing is, Gruithon dies at quite the young age. Meaning that... well he never even got to graduate from Paladin training, so I was more or less obliged to draw him in trainee clothing.
Now, some of you, that stuck around last year probably remember this drawing I made of Ruindîr and Cevrond as Newbee Trainees:

So, I worked quite abit around the story, so that drawing is by far not accurate anymore... I'll redraw those after the next obligatory artwork >w<"
But even though the drawing is outdated, it gives you an idea of the clothing xD

So... I didn't export the first sketch so here's the second one:

Wanna hear a funny thing? The pose was inspired by a Dipper-fanart... seeing that thing was also the reason I decided to draw one of my trainee OCs...  yeah. Long live Gravity Falls, I guess.

So I decided to have a scene where the group's out and about, doing some wilderness training as the background idea for everything.
So I went ahead sketched out my idea and then went on to refine his features a bit. Since I still struggle a lot with clothing, those took me the sketch above before going ahead and refining everything but the face a bit more.

So, at that point I was not all too motivated to continue, so I went ahead an planned my colours out, since it's the first time I draw him and I always like knowing where I'll be landing at the end of it.

So whilst choosing the colours I oriented myself a lot along Cev's little brother Calphen, since I was absolutely oblivious to the fact that I changed Gruithons ethnicity ages ago... I don't know how I could forget that he's a Nightmare and not a Shadowdancer... but alas, I was tired. And even though I got his skin and hair colour utterly wrong, I somehow did everything else right? To be honest I have no idea what I did that evening....
So whilst some things made no sense, I only had to change up a few minor details colourwise in the end, and to remember the absolutely cursed nature of the colour blotches, I shall present this (hilarious) abomination to you:

Okay, so let's talk a bit about the clans and their ethnicities, so that all the new people have a rough idea what's going on. The Paladins are an organisation in the southern continent of my fantasy world Mesoria. The South is known for a magical anomaly, which are hard magical regions. Usually, those magical regions have soft edges, meaning you cannot determine a fixed border between them and it's just a natural, gradual gathering of one type of magic in the athmosphere. The south however has hard borders, which were then used as the borders between the seperate Clans, which then evolved into Countries (for tradition-reason they are still called Clans though). Now, each type of magic has their own god, who's DNA consists solely of their magic-type. Each type of magic has their region in the south, thus each clan has their one main god and their main magic-type.

Now, the thing is, each clan thus also has their own ethnicity, since the athmospherical magic, influences the DNA of every child at birth, mostly influencing phenotypical and only a few characteristical features, meaning that through a person's appearance you can presume where they are from.

Now, our child Gruithon here is from the Nightmare-Clan, which is devoted to Mystos, god of fear and horrors. So whilst that sounds very brutal indeed, the clan itself is known for it's very creative and positive society. Having grown up to see the beauty in the terrifying, they usually see everything that scares them as a possability to learn and turn into something wonderful.
They are famous for their high number of successful musicians, featuring bands such as "Rebellion Rising," "Mindgames," and "Harmonies of the Past."
The clan colour is a deep violet-red, representing the shadows of the night, the depth of the ocean and the bright red of blood at once.
Visually, Nightmare-Harath are known for rather light-toned skins, light brown hair (even though some exceptions of lighter and darker hair colours aren't that outlandish) and dark eyes that usually have rather muted colour variations of everything between purple and red.
The clan metal is black iron, simply because silver-toned metals were "overused" by other clans... especially those, that were devoted to the Descendants of the Moon (Shadowdance (darkness); Gravebuild (death); Frosthill (ice)) and the Nightmares didn't want any yellow metals. So they went black.

So the colour palette was more or less set from the start and after having figured everything out colour-wise, I went on with the "lineart."
So I finished the lines, filling in the flats now and then after finishing a section, to relax a bit. And then.... and then we got to the part that posed the most fun element of the drawing, as well as the most challenging in several ways: the backpack.

Now, the thing is, I never drew one of those before in my life, so my first step was to go reference-hunting. After having a rough idea of how those things would look, I sat there for a few minutes, letting myself kinda daydream into his character and wondering what the heck that boy would pack and how his luggage would look in that case.
And after I then wasted another ages on pinterest, because "oooh, pretty picture" I went ahead and sketched this here:

Thing is, the backpacks are given to the trainees from the Order, as well as sleeping bags, etc. so those were most likely clan-specific. Keeping his friendship with Ûndaer (from the Stonecrush (earth) clan) in mind, I thought: hm, maybe the two swapped backpacks to change up the colour scheme a bit?
So the backpack was some sort of green (as seen in the colour comp at the beginning). He'd have a bedroll with him and survival essentials, inclusing two water bottles, that I decided to put on the sides of the bag. I also thought that he'd have either some scrolls or a rope ladder, but after lining decided to leave that away alltogether (it's getting late and I was lazy >w<)
When doing the lineart overall, I tried to pay as much attention to the layers of fabric above each other, since I have the tendency to downplay the threedimensionality of that..... and I want to battle that pet peeve of mine ^-^

So, after I did the lines on top of everything I finished off the colours.
Overall I tried to keep as true to the clan ideals as possible.... and I gave him tattoos on his arms, because his parents have a tattoo studio and he desperately wanted some since he was a little kid ^-^
(His parents are both heavily inked, so I decided to just steal that quote from this child somewhere on the internet and make the entire "How old will I be until the pictures appear?" vibe define his childhood xD )

So now that we mentioned his family... let's talk a bit about his life, hm?

As mentioned, his parents opened a tattoo studio, both being artists and having that life goal for... well ever. So he's an only child (quite a rare thing in Mesoria, but yes, it does indeed happen), and got to spend a lot of time in the studio, quite often sitting behind the counter doing homework, drawing or keeping the customers company and chatting with them or calming them down, whilst they were getting their tattoos or waiting for them.

He's a very sociable person, very open minded and also quite rebellious, due to the ammount of different people that visited the studio, as well as having grown up in a coastline city, were a lot of merchants and travellers come around.
Other than drawing, he likes swimming, origami, candle making and kickboxing, attempting to balance his creative nature as well as his highly varying energy levels during puberty. But not only do his energy turbulate a lot, he has a lot of mood swings and low self control, quite often unwillingly snapping at his friends or parents. Luckily his charming arse always saves his life, when he comes crawling back and apologises.

Now, why did this adventurous, rebellious, confident Teenager now decide to join the Order of Paladins and not fulfill his plans of becoming a freelance, travelling artist? What brought him to give up his peaceful ideals to become a warrior?
The answer is simple: Revenge.
His family went to visit his grandparents over the holidays when he was just about to finish school. They came back four days later, to find the entire eastern half of the city destroyed. Luckily they lived in the south-western half, so their home was luckily undamaged, but not everyone was as lucky as they were. Including Iaunor and Nedion, many people died, and having lost two of his best friends, as well as his school, his favourite hangout place, the place where he went for kickboxing and the graveyard where his orphaned cousin had been buried, Gruithon wanted to know who's fault this was.
And so he found out that this was the work of the Knights of the Night. Plans from then on were: Join the Paladins, the largest enemy of the Knights, get revenge, leave the order and then become a freelancing traveller.

And he worked towards that new goal with utter determination, even though his parents didn't approve of this new development, they supported him. So he got accepted to the appliance trials and made it into training. Once there, he then became very best friends with Cevrond and Ûndaer, sharing a room with Ûndaer, until he changed to a single-room because of his mental issues and Cev moved in with him.
Cev and Ruith then got along even better, and wherever one of those three went, you always knew that the other two would be somewhere nearby. The trio then spent time together 20/7 (days only have 20 hours there, so..... ye...) and Gruithon slowly noticed, how this was something that he never wanted to give up in life, just trashing the plan and deciding to stay a paladin until he dies.

So, first training century ends and everyone is allowed to return home for a month or have a simple break, before having a 13 month long internship at a paladin quarter within their clan. The boys got seperated, writing letters every day to each otherand staying in constant contact, until the second century of training rolls around. Everything seems to go perfectly fine, until in the middle of the 89th year, a military emergency comes along. The Paladins, now needing to focus on protection of the people, decided to send the trainees off to temporary internships again, with the difference that they could now decide to what quarter they want to go. So Gruithon just joined Cev, and together they went to Cevs quarter. Ûndaer thought about joining them, but instead decided to go the quarter of his cousin, so he could also visit his aunt and uncle, who he hasn't seen for centuries, again.

And this marks the end of our little boy. Cev and Ruith are out on a boring watchtower position as an unregistered dragon with rider enters the airspace. The person is armed, the boys were supposed to just shoot them down, since the actual paladins would take too much time, and... well, the intruder shot first, blowing up half of Ruiths skull. Directly in front of Cev. This is also the moment in which Cev get's his first certified kill, by the way, and his lifelong trauma.

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:D

Oh, and here's a close-up of his face, since I really really like the colour of his eyes >w<

I also tried out something new... I always loathed Artstyles, where you could still see the facial features through the hair.... no matter if it's just the lineart or the entire coloured thing, I hate it. I very much have nothing against artists that have that in their style, but.... dang it's just something I personally don't like at all.
Well, until now, where I very faintly attempted to implement this in here as well... I am slowly loosing my artstyle guys... first the slit pupils, now the fully opaque hair.... what will be next?? My long necks?!
So yeah. Anyways, I just thought I might mention it here, since you can't really see it in any of the former WIPs because of wattpads wonderful picture quality ^-^

So, I hope you lot like the drawing as much as I do! Personally, Gruithon is one of my favourite characters and I do regret a lot, that I need to kill him off, since his death was the first landmark in Cevs life and character development, as well as the first catalyst to cause Cev and Ru's friendship..... but dang it's a lot harder, now that he has a face....

Welp...

>>gives you tea, cookies, blankets and a hug<<

... everyone dies at some point and we shouldn't mourn his future death, but instead look forward to the wonderful moments, in which he draws some very detailed cocks on Cevs face with a permanent marker whilst our blondie there is sleeping. Or when he blames everything that goes wrong on Cev, and Cev blames everything on Ûndaer, and Ûndaer blamed everything on Ruith, so nobody knows who did what and either all of them or none get punished ^-^

I hope you maybe stick around for another while, make yourself comfortable, maybe check out some other chapters or write some comments ^-^
I'm always happy about comments... I try to respond to all of them, but some I miss and watty has the tendency to not allow me to see them, so.... and whilst we're talking about comments, it's always cool to talk about the piece, the character or art in general, but I don't complain if you just write out your reactions to what's written or start a random conversation (Nobody ever asks how the weather is over here QwQ). I like posting my art and ranting on about it, but I think it's always a bit empty when nobody wanders in and chats a bit, so I wholeheartedly encourage you to just come along with your own ideas, thoughts and opinions :D

I also wanted to use this to quickly thank sweet_predator for voting through my 2o2o Artbook "Leaves" at the moment... dang I feel so honoured over here and have the feeling that I don't say "thank you" enough, which is why I plan on maybe mentioning someone now and then, who are friendly enough to waste their spare time on looking at my art and commenting, voting or reading, and make themselves stand out to me >w<
Doesn't mean I don't appreciate my trusty regulars of course (Yes, I see and notice you, I'm always happy to see your little username whenever I upload a new chapter  and I'm always curious to see when you guys are still awake >w<) - I'm just welcoming the new ones to our little tea-party, don't you get scared ^-^

Oof... look at me, getting sidetracked again, so yeah. Have a wonderful rest of you morning/day/evening/night and I hope to read you sometime soon again!