Oki dokie, so... everyone who followed me from my old artbook, probably remembers this wonderful drawing I made:

If you're interested in my thought process back then.... the chapter is called [ ᴏᴄ - ʀᴇʙᴇʟʟɪᴏɴ ɪɴ ʙʟᴜᴇ ] and is somewhere amongst the May-chapters... it is indeed in german, but since everyone here kinda preferes that language I doubt that that'll be an issue >w<"

So recently I have been wanting to continue writing on Defiance again, so I worked a lot on the entire rebellion-phase of the plotline, that will now finally start to happen in the story. I may go back and rewrite the first chapters, but..... meh.... I can leave that to the 2. draft and edits.

 Anyways, after I worked on the plot a bit I drew this thing, to portray Feredirs character development. I already did one ages ago for Maethdess, but since that one is still accurate (even though the art(style) is outdated) I'll go back to that sometime else.

I then went ahead, after figuring out some other rebellion-related characters (such as Esgaron, Deluech, Dàwen, Síladîr, and several others whos names I keep forgetting) and drawing some of them, and drew Feredir some new fancy outfits, to match the overall rebellion-aesthetic.

And if you read the chapter in regards of all of that, then you probably remember, how I based the outfit on the far left more or less on that drawing I made in may.

After I finished my entry for the "Stille Kunst Post" and my wife immediately used it as a phone wallpaper (aaahhhhh... still feel so honoured...), I got very much reminded of the drawing from may, which is her wallpaper on a different phone.

So, I got out my references and went ahead to work on the more story-accurate version of the original drawing ^-^
As we all now, I start with a scribble sketch, so here's my rough plan for the placement of things. Goal was, to make the drawing a bit more dynamic, less flat, and also experiment with two different light sources:

After doodling that down, I started with the head (as we all know me) and refined the overall sketch a lot. I initially wanted to use a smaller sized brush for the clothing, but fount that the larger one just worked a lot better without a proper anatomy sketch below ^-^

I then continued with the lineart... and believe it or not, this prooved to be more tricky than you'd think, simply because I kept forgetting that I'm working on a flipped canvas at times... like... I have no idea how often I had to erase an earring, or mirror some scars, or change the facepaint, because I kept forgetting with side was the normal one. And yes, I could've just looked at the writing on my little wip-signature there, but when I draw I don't realise stuff like that... #BigBrainMode

So either way, this idiot here made himself a shitload of more work, but eventually figured stuff out. Since the old drawing was such a milestone for me in terms of imagining my drawings to be more three-dimensional and adding texture to different materials (especially the leather and metal), I decided to try my very best in pushing me in terms of "how for can my rendered style go, without the painting-part"? Since... well my usual style involves lineart and since I got lazy in rendering everything I minimized the shading effort after only drawing flat-coloured images for nearly the entirety of 2o2o. I then took the deliberate decision to only put the amount of shading effort into larger pieces for challenges, contests, or collabs (because..... well, I wanna do something "proper" for the other people ya know?) and create most of those in my painting-style, that we can see in this drawing as an example:

... well, either way, I wanted to go ahead and test my boundaries in my normal art style, without all the shortcuts to make the drawing process faster and easier.

But we'll see all of that, as soon as I come to it. Here's some lineart WIPs:

After finishing the lineart I went in with the flatcolours.

Idea was again, to portray the scene where he got that nasty forehead-scar (even though I changed quite a bit about how and why it happened, but that story-dump will come before the final drawing, as usual >w<) so there would indeed be bloos involved. I also was an idiot and put the warpaint on the wrong eye, and couldn't manage to make it look as good as it did before on the other one, so... yeah.... that's a thing now...

I also tried to make Feredir less focused on that wound he has there and wanted to bring across the fact that during that time, he was indeed a corrupted, vengeful "villain"
I attempted to get that evil-vibe across in the first drawing, but failed, so I made him look more worried. I thought that I'd go ahead and use my improved drawing skills to make past-psy proud >w<

After finishing up the flats I obviously proceeded with the shading, starting with the leather and metal, since those are the most fun parts to do and I was worried, that If I'd do them towards the end, I might rush them a bit.

I tried to really enhance the feeling for this really warm, yellow lightsource coming from the left, roughly where Feredir is looking. Especially fun was that metal emblem that is embedded within the leather of his shoulder-arm-plates, since I wanted to get a proper feeling of depth on that one.

Also tried my very best to show how Feredir really doesn't give a shit about his armour and quite often makes himself the main target for bullets, bombs, spells, swords, etc. causing the metal and leather to look quite damaged... maybe I overdid it, but it on the leather, but DANG was the metal fun to shade ^-^

Another thing that was interesting, was trying to make the metallic parts of the fabric look metal, but different to the metal of his armour. I initially intended for it to be some metallic fabric, but in the end decided to go with magically fluidified metal instead... that meaning, that the metal iteself is solid, but through the magic-particles that were added during the making-process, it's were flexible and behaves more or less like fabric.

Talking about fabric, after having finished the metal and leather, I continued with the rest of the clothing, trying to bring as much depth and difference in texture in there, as I could, by using different shading techniques, overlay textures etc. ... that went more or less well >w<
I did indeed need to tone down a ton of the textures, since they competed to much with each other and distracted from the main focus: face, meaning that in the end they all look kinda similar, except that I have an overlay-texture for that under-shirt-scarf-thingy and that the scarf is more reflective than the jacket. Still gotta work on fabrics guys.... fabrics are a pain...

Especially difficult here, was trying to keep that primary light source in mind and not adding any of the reflected-light, bounce-lighting, gap-shadows and bundle-light, that I'd usually enhance a lot to make the drawing look more glowy, ethereal, but also a bit surreal with some cartoony-elements.

If we take my redraw of "lost" as an example, it makes absolutely no sense for the (for us) right arm to have a rimlight. There's no light there, it's supposed to be dark. Usually I also would've added a backlighting-ish effect along the neck, as I did with the hair and jawline here.
You know, I like those effects, and whilst they make no sense at all, they help bring that stylised-thing into my drawins that just makes them pop a lot more.

And since I've deliberately done them for so long, I slowly automatically add those nonsensical lights in. So now trying to deliberately not do those (since I wanted to add a second light source in the end, that would do that job for me, as well as adding a lot of rimlight-details in the end), was extremely difficult.
I kept finding myself erasing them... so yeah... that was interesting indeed, but also fun, since it forced me to think a bit more about my light again

So yeah... next up we have the last WIP! (that also includes the finished jacket, so... no worries >w<)

But most importantly we have the eyes, that I shaded in afterwards.... OH BOY was that fun! You all know how I have a love for shading eyes ever since I started drawing, so trying out new stuff in regard of those is always a blast.

We all know how Feredir had a glowing eye in the last drawing. It looked a bit out of place, honestly, so I attempted to make the entire thing I had going on with Esgaron and his eye, also happen with Feredir, but kinda reversed, you know?
So Esgaron has this glowing eye with this black stuff spreading out from it, and with Feredir I wanted to have a similar effect, just with glowing stuff and far less extreme. Esgaron has his eye as a constant condition, having grown up with it and all that good stuff, whilst Feredir's eyes only glow randomly sometimes (depending on the ancient-magical concentration in the athmosphere) or when he uses a large amount of magic... as in this case ^-^

But the entire magical-skin-stuff only got added later on, during the skin-shading process, so the eye does indeed look a bit weird and boring at this point... either way, it was a ton of fun, since I tried some new texturing methods. They worked great, but sadly the eyes are too small for one to really notice, and later on the highlights cover most of them... they still look different, but the new things aren't as "in your face" as they looked, before I added some shines and effects later on...

Welp, here's that picture then ^-^

And now... muahahaaaahha.....

STORY TIME, MAH DUDES!
(no idea how much of this info I already said or not, so if I repeat information, then you just gotta deal with it >w<)

So, you probably are familiar with the fact, that Feredir was part of the Azure Rebellion, an organisation that plans to destroy the leadership of several countries, in order to reinforce equality and harath rights.
But since that goal is only a cover, the actual goal is for the leader, Deluech, to get revenge on the East (for essentially replacing her and her superior position in society with Maethdess) and gain more power and influence in the South... in other words, we have the reincarnation of the goddess of pain planning world-domination.

So since the Rebellion poses a large threat for society (they are indeed a terrorist-orgnisation and have indeed harmed civilians to make governments mad), the Paladins decided to get involved, leading to a series of clashes, that reached their peak in the Rebellion-Wars, were devastation and full-on war destroyed large parts of the south-east of the southern continent.

Feredir was very much involved in those wars, becoming main strategizer at a very young age. His military genius (that btw did indeed somewhat continue on in Cevrond) was feared by not only the Paladins, but also the people within the Rebellion, wich eventually lead to Deluech starting a romantic relationship with Feredir, to ensure that he wouldn't ramdomly decide to turn and kill them all.
And because of said relationship, Deluech started to dump more and more of her workload on Feredir, because she's also very lazy and found that Feredir hat a lot of fun with organising and optimising everything.

So Feredir was more or less leader of the Azure Rebellion and had a several step plan, which also involved absolutely destroying their main opponent: the Paladins.
He tried his very best, and probably would've succeeded, if Fer wouldn't have come to his senses and destroyed the Rebellion instead. But during that, the Stargazer became quite a known name amongst the Paladins, and a somewhat direct rivalry blossomed between Grand Master Runeblade and Feredir here. (very fun indeed when they meet again for tea later on, because of Cev... I love that scene way too much >w<")

Before I jump into the direct relation to the picture, I quickly wanna remark, that there are no dragons in the east. Well, there are indeed dragons, but they are huge monsters that are named "moving mountains" in Aevestna and usually are something the people there run away from. So when Feredir migrated to the South, he got a dragon from the Rebellion. It was a black drake with a lot of spiky scales and horns, that was named "Thorn." Thorn was a bit arrogant and agressive, but also very caring and loved chin scratches more than anything >w<
Feredir and Thorn got along great and they developed together really well, going through this corruption arc and at several points in time having nobody other than each other to trust.

Now, to the actual drawing again:
During one of the battles, Feredir managed to lure out "the big guys" which is essentially a different wording for: He managed to cause enough chaos, for the holy guardians needing to appear on the field.
Feredir got a bit ahead of himself, completely underestimating 2. Holy Guardian Cloudspear when trying to get to 3. Holy Guardian Asharrow (who was the main strategy-person of the Paladins). What did that mean? Well it lead to Cloudspear kicking Feredir out of course, so that Blackberry could launch a direct attack, that resulted in Thorns death.

Feredir now just lost the only friend he could 100% rely on and was completely devastated. Whilst running from further attacks from Cloudspear he did indeed find another dragon, who was mourning the death of it's harath, so they more or less teamed up and fled back to HQ.
FUCK YEAH GUYS, THAT'S WHERE PAGE COMES FROM :D

Either way, Feredir was out for revenge... and since I didn't plan all to many details on that yet, the rest here will be pretty short, so me is very sorry for that QwQ

So during his paladin-related plans of completely obliterating the Order and strangling Runeblade with his own darn hands, he also added "make Blackberry's life a living hell". And that not also included killing Blackberrys dragon, which Feredir knew would be a lot worse for Blackberry than for him, simply because Blackberry is a noble, so the dragon was with him since birth. No, Feredir wanted to also use this chance to weaken Blackberry so much, that it would more or less mentally defeat him, and thus also make Cloudspear less attentive, meaning that two of the five leading forces of the Order were unable to take properly thought through decisions, if any at all.

So Feredir did indeed end up killing Blackberrys dragon, blowing up Blackberrys old Quarter only moments later, and then burning down half of his home-city a week afterwards, killing a niece of his.

And during the battle, where Feredir kills Blackberrys dragon, he got nastily hit by Cloudspear again, straight across the head :D

Welp, that was it then for that...
I enjoyed the process of drawing the hair a lot. I was worried whilst drawing it, that it looked a bit odd, but when adding the glowy details in the end, alongside the blue light from behind, I ended up liking it a lot! This alo is probably the best short hair I drew until now, so... yeah >w<
Also had a blast colouring his cut, even though the blood running down the (for us) right side of the face got a bit ruined when I added the second lighting... I should've gone over it again later on, getting that red in there again, but hey, I still like it a lot.

I ended up probably having the most of fun with effect-layers on top at the end. Dunno why, but they kinda tied up the drawing, that did indeed look a bit awkward beforehand, and when adding the long awaited detailed reflections on top... ah, that just made my heart sing.

So yeah! Here's the final redraw:

And because I'm somewhat proud, here's some close-ups, in defiance of the wattpad-upload-quality:

And that was it from me for today! Have some WIPs in store that I might share in the next chapter. Overall I am incredibly proud of this drawing, simply because I'm impressed at my rendering skills (haven't done that in ages, tbh >w<) and also finally managed to make Feredir look the way he's supposed to look!

Hope you like the drawing as much as I do, gotta go to french class now, so the ending may be a bit rushed....

>>cuddles you lot and gives you biscuits and tea, before vanishing off to lessons<<