Welcome again, my friends, and join me on this beautiful ride of a chapter :D

So you may remember Paladin Asharrow from a few chapters ago (if not.... i was about to say "check him out" but there will indeed be a picture of him at the bottom of the chapter, so if you simply read on you will be good to go ^-^")? I decided that I wanted to turn that sort of character portrayal into a series, depicting the four holy guardians, as well as the grand master of paladins, and some other important figures within the order.

And since we already had Asharrow, I decided to draw our other Fireforgean Paladin, who we all love and know all to well: Paladin Dragonfire.

.... also known as Ruindîr. See? I tried to trick you into thinking, that i'm gonna introduce you to a new fireforgean paladin, but no! It's just Ruindîr again... since I haven't drawn him this year and half of the month was already over when I started the picture >w<

So we get another picture of Ruindîr, except that this time it's different, since I drew him in a cool outfit (the one in the middle with some added details, since he only goes for cloak and all that when it's cold):

... and I gave him an actual pose. YOU CAN SEE HIS TORSO AND HE ISN'T A SHY BOII ATTEMPTING TO CRAWL BACK INTO HIS SKIN THROUGH INSECURITIES N ALL THAT!!

>>looks at shocked readers, since I just scripture-yelled at them for an entire sentence<<

Um.... so yeah. I then moved on to make a sketch, which I plan on making a bit more detailed in future, since I want to try and draw the detailed sketch, which I will then use as a lineart, directly on top of this mess, as I already do with my faces and hair.
So here's that for ya:

Idea was, to depict him in a pose, that he would strike after just getting off of his dragon Ember, from a flight over the fireforgean desert. His scarf is usually used to wrap around his head, to protect him from sand that might be in the air and obviously the merciless sun, whose power is amplified by the high percentage of fire magic in the air. That initial thought got brought across pretty well in the initial sketch, but I totally forgot what I was going for when drawing the scarf later on, so it is rested more on his shoulders than it actually should. Thus it just looks as though he's simply pulling the scarf away from his face, which also isn't an all that bad pose >w<

Anyways. After tha initial sketch I drew in the details, starting with the face as always and attempting to imitate the style I developed through the Asharrow picture. I continued relatively detailed on the torso, since I am  indeed warming up to that (yayy).
I then slowly worked my way around, since a lot of the arm-placement relied on clothing placement. Meaning this isn't an actual WIP, since the Arms only came in after I drew the trousers... anyways, here's a wannabe-naked Ru >w<

I don't know about you, but drawing his torso is crazy difficult. Since he's quite athletic, because of regular training, but also extremely thin and nimble, because of his genes (the royal family is usually built rather elegant) and his eating habits (he never eats all that mutch from nature, has a very healthy diet, and not seldomly shows some anorexic tendencies because of his depression). So I always need find a middle, whilst also stylising it, which does indeed pose quite some struggles, especially when hunting for references (I am very much ashamed of the amount of images of starving people I sometimes need to use for him.... really something I'm not proud of... it's like looking up what being addicted to drugs feels like or how it feels to freeze to death... I need this stuff for my creations, but I'm not proud of what I sometimes need to look up for that)

Enough about this rant on Ruindîrs naked torso. Nobody wants to hear that (except you're thirsty as fuck... then that's just weird...), instead let's talk about the next step! Which was adding the clothing. I initially decided to keep the sketch of that very clean and the use it as a lineart, but instead ended up loosing motivation and just very roughly sketching around, settling on needing to make a cleaner pass on top later on.

So then I went ahead and cleaned things up, which was surprisingly more fun than I thought it would be, since... well, adding small details to make fabric look more fabric is always cool ^-^
This was also the first time of me drawing gloves, which is something I did indeed struggle quite a bit with, but managed okay after looking at enough references. And even though I drew the hands last, I did indeed drawing them quite a bit. Overall, the thought of drawing hands or torsos is indeed still a bit daunting, but I am gaining more confidence in it and it is getting easier
Good to know that my little school-doodles and sketchbook spreads helped on that >w<

After dupicating the lineart layer and setting it on multiply, I started to colour him in. It's always fun to draw Ruindîr, since I get a lot of practise on drawing clothing and usually only need to shade his face and hands ^-^
And... well it's always fun to draw him, since he's my favourite and I always draw him.... but that's a different topic >w<

When picking the colours for his clothing initially, I went with the traditional golden glowing patterns of the desert, with a lot of warm, earthy tones. But instead of the very light colours used in the fireforgean military, in order to hide better in the sand, I went with some darker, more saturated, brown colours, to also show how the Angelwings and his higher rank have influenced his clothing to be less practical and more visual.
The outfit of his on the far right is more of a traditionally fireforgean Paladin attire from his earlier years (just for comparison purposes >w<):

But that's not all that there is to the colour scheme. The other thoughts were admittedly only secondary, when it came to the hue-choices. The main reason for the colours to be this dark, was for underground missions.
So, as some of you know, Ruindîr lives on my fantasy planet Mesoria, which has a lot of monsters and whatnot, but also floating continents. Why precisely the continents float is... a topic that doesn't belong in this chapter, since that would require way to much explaining, but just know that there are floating continents and big ass monsters. I have indeed not talked a lot about the Holy Order of Paladins itself, but they are an organisation founded in the name of Vigra (goddess of life) to protect the overall civilisation from the threats posed to them.
In short: they hunt down monsters to protect people, but then other people got nasty so they were forced to also fight those other people in order to avoid collateral damage.

So our little Paladin boy Ruindîr here, who actually has a rank too high to go out in the field and do some monster-hunting, still likes to go out there. Why? Well, he climbed the ranks pretty early in his life, so he never got to experience all the things one usually would've, when becoming holy guardian. Anyways, he only goes out there when we are faced with a Monster of at least the category: UL-G3 (Underground Leviathan - Size category: Gargantum, Threat Grade 3 (10 being a small threat, 1 being a calamity))..... is Ruindîr an overpowered OC? Yes, but I make it work somehow...
Anways... underground = darkness, so in order to remain as unseen as possible, he has rather dark attire in this case. And whilst I do indeed like to make the patterns look, as though they glow... they don't. Glowing fabric is a royalty thing ^-^

Anyways, here's the flat-WIP you've been waiting for, whilst I ranted on about clothing colours and the Paladins:

After colouring everything and sleeping for another night, I came back and started the shading, attempting to keep it as minimal as possible, since I wanted it to match my Asharrow portrayal... surprisingly, it was very relaxing to just only work with two shading layers and one highlight layer... and even though I kept wanting to continue to render, I also could focus on what shadows were the most important, and what ones were the most effective. Very fun indeed.

Nearly as fun as this WIP, where I was just about to start shading the skin, but thought his flat face looked so funny with all the surrounding parts >w<

Not a lot left for me to say honestly... I finished the shading, added some rimlights as well as my signature and the text with his very long name.
Oh, before I show you the final piece, I just wanted to draw your attention to his lips. Simply, because I am finally able to give my boys actual, proper lips without making them look immediately female as a result ^-^
This is only a small detail, but it is indeed something I have been struggling with for quite some time and something that has been bothering me, since I do indeed know how my characters look in every detail. Yes, including fingernails, ears, hairline, lips, eyebrows, ... I don't know, armpit-hair, etc. You name it, I know it. And the moreof that I am able to portray in my drawings, the happier I am :D
(also... I just now realised how I forgot to colour his nails... damn... anyways since you can't see them all to well because of that, he likes to bite those when he's concentrating so they look pretty nasty)

Also a small note on the metal. Usually I rely a lot on the texture, as I already mentioned in the last chapter, but I finally figured out a way to make it look metallic, even though I'm just using a simple airbrush, which is also a huge improvement in terms of understanding different surfaces better and how to convey different materials.
I still struggle a lot on different kinds of fabric, which does indeed annoy me quite a bit, but I do have the feeling, that I can create a difference between thick, thin, flowy and stiff materials now. Can't make things look more fuzzy and others more soft yet, but that probably will come through time and practise ^-^

So yeah! That's the finished drawing. And since I realised how I now drew two of my characters in half-body I was very much excited to export transparent PNG files of the two and put them next to each other, in order to create a size comparison :D

When drawing other Paladins, those will obviously be added to the image, but for now I am very excited to present to you this image:

It is indeed quite funny to think that Lithrdir is rather small, due to being constantly malnourished in his childhood and adolescenc, and Ruindîr being this rather tall and lanky guy. Wait until I can add Cev to the image, since he's even bigger than Ruindîr... wait, I think I made myself a really rough guide sometime... let me dig that out...

Okay... well, to be honest Cev is indeed a bit bigger than that... I made that thing in July 2020 and some things have indeed changed since then...

Anyways! I hope you like the drawing as much as I do! Any Paladins you know of, that you might want to see next? I'm thinking about either tackling the Grand Master Certhadan, Blackberry or Cloudspear next... but I'm not too sure, so any suggestions are very much welcome >w<

Oohhh.... except.... except you wanna see an OC that none of you know about.... he is also an adopted design, so......... if you're curious about that one just tell me and he'll be next ^-^

Okay okay...
>>climbs up on treehouse and carefully let's down cookies, drinks and blankets with basket<< (See! I've learnt, Mith ^-^)
I guess that was it then, huh? See you lot in the next chapter then (hopefully, at least), and until then I hope you'll make yourself comfortable and stick around for a while ^-^
I love chatting with you guys in the comments sp feel free to just... comment away. Whether thats about the character, the drawing or something completely off-topic, I don't mind, as long as you have a good time.

So, until I finally get around to uploading the next chapter:

also... a friend from school got me into genshin impact... haven't played yet but fell in love with the character designs, so after being introduced to Diluc I created this little doodle:

... how can it be legally allowed to have such floofy hair??