Dragon Quest Fanart: Druin.

Cross posted all over the place.

Afternoon. So, today we have a new piece of non-hoers fanart.

I’ve recently been playing through the original Dragon Quest for NES. The title has some peculiar monsters in it, with unique visual designs. In fact, the series, and particularly the visuals, were the creation of Akira Toriyama, of Dragon Ball fame. Anyway, I decided to sketch some of the characters with illustration ink. First up is the Druin, a flying squid-like creature.

Here is what it looks like in the game;

I did the pencils for it a while back, and just got around to inking and coloring it this afternoon.

The lineart came out pretty well, I think.

This was followed by some coloring and inking with illustration inks, brushes, and pens.

It doesn’t look as soft as it does in the game. The purple back is re-imagined as a sort of carapace-like covering.

I tried to match the colors as closely as possible to the original sprite. One of the cool things about retrogames is the vibrant, unique color palettes they had to work with, due to technical limitations. It results in a much more distinct set of creatures than you get when everything is brown, gray, and sepia toned.

So, yeah. I may do a few more of these. I have the pencils for one other, but those need to be reworked slightly.

My scanner is not the best, so you may see that the drawing has some color depth which the photo has captured, but the scanner has not.