I'm actually not a HUGE Drizzt Do'Urden fan... I'm only just now getting around to reading Salvatore's "Hunter's Blades" trilogy (just finished the second book), and I enjoy it as a sort of modern continuation of classic pulp fantasy... elves and dwarves and giants and orcs, oh my, I got a serious soft spot for all of it. Of course, it didn't hurt that I also just picked up Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone for the X-Box, which has some really sweet art direction (and guest-stars everyone's favorite rogue drow). All of this has kind of come together to tip my hand into a little light fan art.

The whole Drizzt series was just getting started while I was in high school, so I got a bit of nostalgic fondness for the character. I was always very irritated at the early portraits of him, wherein artists kept illustrating him as an old man, because anyone who knows ANYTHING about Drizzt knows that he's a pretty young elf, less than 100, which makes him in many ways more the equivalent of a twentysomething.

If you're not familiar with the character, he's the creation of fantasy novelist R.A. Salvatore, and a standard of the D&D Forgotten Realms universe. He's quite the iconic figure to fantasy fans, an outcast from his people and society, adventuring with his great panther familiar through the wild northlands of the world.

D&D illustrator Todd Lockwood nailed him pretty well in the big 3E revamp of the whole D&D universe, though, and this illustration is based heavily on his canonical design. I took some liberties here and there, espescially with his twin swords... while there's a very solid and set design for these blades now, I don't recall that they're supposed to be a matched set of identical swords. It's been a few years since I read it all, but I seem to recall that he picked up Twinkle in the Underdark, and Icingdeath in the white dragon's lair, so I always thought they should look slightly different from each other. There's also a lot of argument over the shape of the blades, given that Elmore and others illustrated his scimitars with flared blades more often associated with falchions, and yet Salvatore's described them as being very light and fast weapons. The Lockwood design is a little too straight and sabre-like for my tastes, and since I'm not doing this for WOTC I guess I can take a few liberties there based on my interpretation of Salvatore's work. Of course, if you're getting paid, you rarely have that freedom, and that's just part of the job.

God above, I can go on, can't I? Such a nerd...

Pencil on Bristol, about 14x16 cropped. You can check out a partial rough of the sketch version here >>> [link] <<<

If I was half the colourist I'd wish to be, I'd light this as though he were looking at the sunrise (the reason I chose to flip the drawing, aside from my usual pique, is that I think having him look to the left reads more as "East" than looking to the right, simply because we subconciously assign "east" to "left" thanks to maps and compass roses. But perhaps I've overthought this...). If you want to take a swing at coloring this version, I don't mind, but keep in mind that this is very much a recognizable character and design, and he's wholly copywritten, trademarked and owned out the wazoo by Wizards of the Coast and R.A. Salvatore... for this reason, I don't plan to take this much farther myself (might be fun to play with screentones) simply because I can't do much more with it before it becomes an effective cost consumer... it was just something I wanted to do for fun and as an homage to a character that I've enjoyed for over a decade now.