so we started Highmountain tonight–

— and I am in love with this zone! So much awesome!😄

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not so inseparable, after all?

When I made myself a list of all the possible Tauren followers so that I could keep track of which ones I’d gotten and know when I’d recruited them all, I discovered that Horde characters can recruit Tholo Whitehoof as a follower from the Inn. Though there are a handful of Human, two Draenei, and one Gnome followers available to Horde characters, there are no Night Elves. Even worse, Anren Shadowseeker isn’t even available to Alliance characters as a possible Night Elf follower. Poor Tholo! What happened to Anren?

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Garrison labor dispute

A Frostwall worker and a Lunarfall worker about to come to blows over who has the best claim to the Garrison Resources each was sent to acquire from the same location…

I thought about just leaving this lineart uncolored —

— but her shirt needed to be bright construction zone orange.

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death knight backstories

Going from oldest to most recent, the next thing in my pile of unposted pictures is a pair of doodle-illustrated origin stories for my first two Death Knights, Kregga (Tauren) and Katelaira (Blood Elf).

I posted Katelaira’s story, illustrated with screenshots, shortly after I originally drafted it; today I went back and added to it the doodle illustrations. I deleted and re-created Katelaira two or three times at least, including the first iteration of the “Underpowered Death Knight” concept. Eventually, she got permanently pruned from my roster.

I began collecting screenshots with which to illustrate Kregga’s backstory. I wrote a summation of Grimtotem lore to try to understand what her motivations would be. That only gave me difficulties with the story that I’d written. Then Cataclysm came along and messed up a lot of areas where I’d wanted to take screenshots. I left the story to gather dust, though I did eventually post what I considered to be the most important bit of it.

That said, if you’re interested in reading my (rather bad) first draft of Kregga’s backstory and seeing the (rather clumsy) doodles that accompanied it, click past the cut to

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Spring Break Art Week

The other day I found myself wanting to sit down and color something. This prompted me to start reorganizing the downstairs bedroom that we have designated the arts-and-crafts room from a storage space into a somewhat more usable working space. In the process, I retrieved my WoW doodle books, and as I flipped through them, I found a handful of drawings that I’ve never posted. When I then looked at my Gallery page here on the blog, I discovered that my art posting has really slowed down over the past year and a half since I started teaching full-time. The last time I posted art was about ten months ago, for Childrens Week last year!

My college has Spring Break this week, so in between doing my taxes and grading that pile of organic chemistry lab reports that’s been getting higher and deeper all semester, I think I’ll catch up on my art posting, too. I’d like to get through all of my backlog of unposted art, so I might be making multiple posts per day.

To start things off, here’s a real blast from the past. One of the very first fully finished WoW art pieces I ever created was this joke comparing high school and game class stereotypes. I guess it wasn’t as funny as I thought it was, though, because it didn’t make the cut when I submitted it to the official WoW site comics. When I first began this blog, one of the first pieces of art I ever posted was the drawings for this piece — which, at the time, I thought I had lost. I recovered the finished file some time ago, then got busy and forgot that I had it until I was looking through my folder of ready-to-post art on my computer just now.

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reasons I’m looking forward to Legion from BlizzCon Friday

Highmountain! You know that I love my Tauren, right? I’m keen to learn some new Tauren lore and the new buildings and so forth look amazing.

High resolution moonkin form! (but no thanks, high resolution seal form, I’ll keep on using Glyph of the Orca)

Flexible leveling! Being able to go through the leveling zones in any order I please will make leveling multiple alts more engaging and entertaining.

Flexible level 110 activities!… though with the way things have been going this semester, I’m concerned that I’ll miss out on some of the activities with the shortest availability windows, especially if Legion doesn’t launch until mid-September — a month after my Fall Semester begins. I sure hope it comes out in late spring or early summer!

Artifact weapons! For the most part, the appearances of the Artifact weapons won’t be affecting my choices of class/spec combinations of alts to to level. Some of them are keen and others I’ll be Mogging over pretty quickly. The rapiers for the Combat Outlaw Rogue look pretty sweet, though — I’d decided to retire my Rogue, but now I’m being tempted to reactivate her. I’m intrigued that the Elemental Shaman weapon is going to be a fist weapon… if I’d known that this was coming, I’d have tried to get Wu-Lai, Bladed Fan of the Consorts for Kamalia back in the Throne of Thunder day.

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putting the SELFIE camera to good use

Several months into Warlords, I’ve finally gotten around to updating my Characters page with new portraits showing how my characters look with the new models!

The SELFIE camera proved useful for getting good facial close-up screencaps to use for this project, as I’d hoped it would. Most of the Tauren expressions are pretty silly, but there are one or two that are cute if you catch them at just the right moment. Alas, that cute, flirty expression turned into a rather… dazed expression when I reduced the new portraits to the 100 x 100 size I use for my Characters page. I still think it’s better than the serious DMV mug shot expression, though. You can’t see the color of their eyes at the small size, either. I should remember to use the camera more often when I’m bopping around the world and when I’m doing Transmogrification photo shoots… and maybe get around to making those individual Character Profile posts/pages with all their favorite mounts and titles and jukebox tracks and suchlike, and links to artwork and stories featuring that particular character.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to update my blog banner. When I last updated it, near the end of Mists, I displayed my One-of-Each-Class set of alts, because I was so pleased with myself for having finally accomplished the goal, which I’d had since I first started playing this game, of getting a character of every class to the level cap.

I won’t be doing that again, though, because I just don’t have the time any more to play classes whose fantasy doesn’t really interest me. I probably won’t play a Demon Hunter much farther than just getting through their starting zone experience, and I’m currently thinking that I may not level the Rogue or the Warlock at all in Legion. Furthermore, making the row of icons along the bottom of the banner small enough to add another one for the Demon Hunter would have made them so small that they’d barely have been readable. Instead, I’ve displayed the alts that I actually intend to play going forward into Legion. I’ve reorganized the listing priority on the Characters page in a similar fashion.

It’s funny how my interest in particular alts comes and goes. I thought I was done with my Human Mage at the end of Mists. Then I decided that if I couldn’t have a High Elf Mage, a Human Mage would be the next-best thing, and so I renamed my Human Mage and made her look as much like my Blood Elf Mage as I could. I wasn’t quite satisfied with that, though. I kept iterating her appearance until I was happy with it, and it turns out that what I really wanted my Human Mage to be is as close to an avatar of my RL self as I could manage (oddly enough, the new model face that I ultimately chose as the one that seemed the closest to just right is one that I probably wouldn’t have chosen in the old model version). As I updated my Characters page, I considered putting my Human Mage’s race down as “High Elf”, signifying that even though the model she uses is Human, RP-wise she is really a Quel’dorei, but that just didn’t feel quite right anymore because I’ve gotten to a happy place with that character as a Human. If by some miracle the Alliance were to get playable High Elves, I’d most likely just create a new character instead of race-changing my Human Mage. I might still faction-change my Blood Elf Mage, though, and create (and perhaps even boost) that new character as a Blood Elf Mage, because I think I’d still want a Blood Elf Mage, as well as a High Elf Mage…

I did, however, put down RP-inspired race descriptions for some of my Tauren characters, indicating customization options (such as Grimtotem war paint) that I would take if they were available. I already knew which characters were of the Taunka and Yaungol sub-races; with Legion introducing a new Taurenoid sub-race, I looked through my other characters to decide which one to retcon as a Highmountain Tauren. I chose my secondary Druid, whose RP description already establishes her as having features that aren’t actually available in the current character customization options. Perhaps curly coat is a trait that was unique to the tribes that lived in the Highmountain region of Pangaea-Kalimdor, or, like the moose horns or the characteristics that distinguish Taunka and Yaungol from Shu’halo, a trait that developed among them after the Sundering split them off from the rest of the Tauren lineages.

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