[ᴀ/ɴ || ɪ ᴡᴀꜱ ɪɴ ᴀ ʀᴀᴍʙʟᴇ-ᴍᴏᴏᴅ ᴛᴏᴅᴀʏ, ꜱᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴇʀ ɪꜱ ʟᴏɴɢ ᴀɴᴅ ɪ ɢᴏᴛ ꜱɪᴅᴇᴛʀᴀᴄᴋᴇᴅ ᴏɴ ᴀ ʟᴏᴛ ᴏꜰ ʟᴏʀᴇ-ꜱᴛᴜꜰꜰ.... ꜰɪɴᴀʟ ᴘɪᴇᴄᴇ ɪꜱ ʀɪɢʜᴛ ᴀᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ʙᴏᴛᴛᴏᴍ ᴀꜱ ᴜꜱᴜᴀʟ, ᴊᴜꜱᴛ ᴡᴀɴᴛᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ɢɪᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀ ɪɴɪᴛɪᴀʟ ʜᴇᴀᴅꜱ-ᴜᴘ >ᴡ<]

I did a thing....

... again...

So, since i am currently working on a few scenes in the so far still nameless third part Ashes, I kinda got this weird idea of drawing just a small portrait of Bronadan at his wedding.

How did it come to that? So in Ashes - Pt.3 Ruindîr (Bronadans only surviving son) dies (only temporarily but nobody knew that, until Ruindîr just suddenly woke up and kicked the arse of the chaos god) and Bronadan then spends about two weeks at the Paladin HQ, since that is where the funeral should have been held.
And since Cevrond is the best friend of Ruindîr, and Ru spent quite some time at Cevs home -  Cevs family more or less indirectly adopting Ru on the side - Cev's family was invited as well! Yayy!

So who's Cev's father and uncle again? Feredir and Tirith! Who're the dudes, who helped Bronadan get off of the streets, who travelled around together for ages and were bestest friends ever? Feredir and Tirith!

So that was quite a reunion right there... I won't delve into the details, but essentially Bron ends up telling Fer and Ti about his wedding, so I felt the urge to somehow visualise that.

Could I have said that shorter? Probably, but I did it like this, so... skksks

So I decided to go on a hunt for references, since.. well we all know how the fireforgean clan is the one, that is the most over the top?? Especially when it comes to the royals?? And then a royal wedding? Jup, that required a shitload of gold and sparkly stuff...

My main inspiration were chinese emperors and empresses, and there mostly the fantasy ones, since they usually go even more overboard than the historicall acurate designs.
I also just used former drawings I made, to just really capture that weird, tribal, ancient egyptian, fantasy, steampunk vibe of the fireforges.

Main references for Bronadan himself were these to drawings I made quite some time ago:

ah I love him so much and doodling him is always fun...

So what was I thinking? Well more or less this:

A lot of facepaint, a lot of shiny and glowly stuff and above all: a shitton of gold and sun-symbolism everywhere.

Why the sun? They are the fireforges, so why did I lean into the sun so much?
Okay, so... I don't know if I ever delved all too far into the religious aspects of the south... wait, no... Ikôr'esh (i wanted to use the proper kontinent-names from now on, remember?), but here's another rough outline of it:

We used to have 15 gods, from which there are only 14 left nowadays. Number 15 was Locatros, god of space (as in... the counterpart to time... and together they ruled over space-time). The clan devoted to him was the Starsong-Clan, which is now eastern Fireforge. Why? Well, because Volcanis (goddess of fire, patron of the Ashhammer-Clan) killed him, whilst being posessed by Anthrax. And I don't mean.... properly "kill" him, no, she oblitterated his soul and yeeted everything that was left of him into the void (an alternate reality nearly, filled with nothing other than the few rocks that remained of the old universe (When Anthrax destroyed the universe, the old gods essentially just took Mesoria and everything they could find into a paralell universe, which is how the planet got saved in the first place, except that the two universes were still tightly interwoven and one could easily go from the mesoria-universe into the void, but without a way of going back)).

So no more god of space and because Volcanis destroyed him, the clans merged into one another and the Fireforgean-Union was forced upon the lands, until the great wars of fire, in which the west fought with the east, until the east surrendered and they became the Fireforge-Clan.

... did I get sidetracked? Yes! But here's the map of Ikôr'esh again, so cou can roughly see some borders n stuff:

Back to the initial question: why the sun?

15 gods. Every god is the personification of an element/type of magic and the elements get sorted into elmental categories:
Mystic --> Magic, Time, Fear
Storm --> Air, Lightning, Water
Natural --> Blood, (Place), Earth
Sun --> Light, Life, Fire
Moon --> Shadow, Death, Ice
So the fireforges have a strong tie to the sun anyways, due to the elemental category of their element. As you can not only see on Bron here, but also in quite a lot of fireforgean clothing the depiction of a triangle with a centre line and a circle above, is one of it's main themes, as it represents the sun in the evening (Life: Sunrise, Light: Sun at noon, Fire: Sunset). The small circle within another circle would represent the Sundance-Clan and the small circle above a triangle which is upside down (i do hope that does make sense in some way, ahahhh) would represent the Angelwing-Clan

So that's were the sun came from, and for the wedding design I wanted to plaster it everywhere, since, in the fireforgean belief, a wedding is the beginning of a new part of someones life. It's like a sunrise, except they're not allowed to use the sunrise-symbol because that would mean that they might give the arrogant-Angelwings another reason to be more arrogant than usual.

Not only is the sun the symbol of weddings, it's also the main symbol of the royal family. For one, because when a new Ruler comes, it's a new era (a new day, if one could say so) for the country, bringing hopefully light, life, fire and wealth upon their citizens. The Royals also are the centre of the country, everything following their lead and circling around them (like back in the old days, when there were enough planets that existed out in space to make solar systems a thing :D).... i just realised that I'm rambling on again, so...

Suns! And a lot of them, for various reasons!

Let's get to the colouring then. So, I decided to make all the jewellery either gold or crystal, since I thought that would look cool. The crystals would be the typically fire-forged ones (haha, see what I did back then when naming them?), that were essentially diamonds, but with elemental magic trapped inside of them, to make it appear as though... well it had liquid fire inside. Since I just used my usual colouring-style for this (and not my rendered one... oof that would've taken even longer than it already did) they ended up looking more like topazes, rather than anything else, but believe me, if I should ever animate one of those bad boys it'll look amazing.

I knew that I waned to have the upper half of his face painted in one more or less solid colour. So, for contrast I wanted to go with a dark purple, and then make the paint and tattoos stand out a bit more, as well as emphasize his eye-make-up. I didn't stick with that though and instead gave him a metallic orange thing later on, to get that clan colour somewhere on the upper half of his outfit somewhere, as well as to make his sad-ish facial expression a bit more visible.

So here's the nearly finished flat-colour WIP:

Okay, before we move on to the shading, I just wanted to say a few things that I forgot to mention right at the beginning:

Well, as you might see in the former portraits I drew, Bronadan (like every other royal family member) has a lot of facial piercings, of which only one of the ones on his nose, the ones between his eyebrows, and the ones on his eyebrows made it into the drawing. Why?
So I did indeed have them drawn in there at the beginning, but realised that it looked a lot more tribal and.... um... amazonian/aztec kinda, which wasn't really the look I wanted and I also wanted to leave enough room for face-paint. So I kept it fairly simple and only focused on the ones that more or less framed the face, rather than disrupted it... in different words: everything that was symmetrical and not in the dead-ass centre.
To combat that, I just put a lot of extra effort into the earrings >w<

Secondly - this one is off topic, but still kinda exciting, so I'll share nonetheless >w< - everyone who know me from discord knows, that I use colour palettes for my characters:

And it has indeed bothered me, how I barely made them, since it took up quite some time to get the format right, and that I never really liked how they looked and tried out various different styles, before setting on the one you can see up there for Cevrond and Aderthon... and being the perfectionist I am, I desperately want all my palettes to look more or less the same, so... I made a base.... and Bron finally got his own palette... and it makes me happy ^-^

I mean... look at them:

... so happy.... so so happy...

After the flats were done, I obviously went on to the shading (wow, who would've thought).

And.... oh boy...... it was a lot... but i'll delve deeper into that in a sec.

Maybe you were thinking: "It's his wedding.... why isn't he happy?"
Okay, so... this isn't only an arranged marriage, it's also the wedding between him and Lachiell, the only woman he ever loved deeply. He loved her? Fuck yeah! They had a relationship for ages and thought about just marrying on their own... but after he proposed and she said "yes", she ran away because she wasn't ready for that commitment yet and didn't know how to tell him, since it'd break his heart. Anyways, he chased after her and then they travelled the world a bit. But only as friends, because she wasn't sure whether she really loved him.
Haha... the poor dude suffers so much, because he's always there for her and she always abuses that fact.... well in the end they become a couple again, until she finds out that he's a royal... and then she calls him a rotten, drug-addicted liar, also mentioning how she hates him more than anything else on this planet and how everything they had and ever could've had is over...

haha.... and a week later they got forcefully married :D

So essentially this is the worst day of his life until then, since he still loves her, but knows that she really, really hates him at that point. (And also because he hates being the centre of attention and the entire continent is more or less watching... he's also in the middle of becoming sober of Echo, so he's experiencing quite the ammount of withdrawals still... and his entire family is super judging him, so as soon as he does something wrong, he knows that he'll be yelled at later.... so yeah..... really not a good day for him...)

Next up is the next WIP... sorry for rambling so much... I may even put a warning at the beginning of the chapter for that.... yeah let's go do that >w<""

So... the thing here is: A LOT OF SHINY STUFF.
And oh bo was that fun. OH BOY  WAS THAT FUN :D

I also finally figured out properly how to shade metal with only the airbrush, which is quite the achievement, since my metal-drawing very heavily relied on textures.... I mean.... with texture:

the only other time I drew metal with just the airbrush (oh boy it hurts me to dig out this old drawing aaahhhhh):

And.... I think my airbrush-metal came a long way.... otherwise I'm also really really happy with the crystals.... I don't draw them often, which is quite a sad thing honestly, but when I do end up sticking some in my drawing, they are one of the most fun parts to do.

Quick question on the side.... would you be interested on a tutorial-series about my sketch-rendering style? I'm still sitting on that one in regards of how I colour hair, but maybe someone would wanna know how I do metal like this in four small steps or how I do my crystals or whatever..... was just curious and asking is never wrong >w<

Okie dokie... is there anything else I want to say before throwing the final drawing in here?

I think I'm good...

so here ya go:

Am I happy with the result: FUCK YEAH.

I honestly didn't imagine it to look as good as it did in the end. I am indeed sad, that I only draw the torso, since all the fancy stuff clothing-wise comes along with the trousers, but... alas this was just supposed to be a small and messy sketch >>cough cough<< well that totally happened >>cough cough<<

I'm especially happy with that headpiece... mostly with the spikes... the ones made of crystal look.. >>chefs kiss<< in my opinion and the ones of metal... aaahhh... I was really worried, that they wouldn't look like metal because of the flat colours beneath, but... DANG... dang that went well.

And the last minute decision to switch from that purple to orange was so worth it. I may have lost contrast, but the background made sure of that, and it looks way more cohesive now... argh, monocoloured palettes are always so appealing to me...

So yeah! I guess that was everything for this time... thanks for fighting through this wall of text (according to wordcount.com it's about 10 pages of text so... quite a bit haha), and whilst it was a lot, still enjoyed all the random trivia about Mesoria and most of all the picture itself >w<""

>>gives you cookies, blanket and a tea<<

See you guys in the next chapter then!