[Art & Warcraft Stuff] January 2023 Doodles

[jordangreywolf]

Back in the boring real world, I ran into a few snags with repair work in my house. In the process of tearing out the walls, they discovered that the plumbing was all brittle old PVC, and cracked very easily. Also, it wasn't up to current code, and they couldn't replace broken sections. "Cracked" or "broken" don't quite describe it -- "shattered" is more like it. I had to bring in a plumber to tackle getting the plumbing replaced with some newer, PEX material -- slightly flexible, longer-lasting, and up to code. So ... $$$. Oh, and the company that had handled the initial pack-out, and overcharged me on several items (pointed out by my insurance company agent), well, I learned that it was suddenly shutting down operations, the people I'd been in contact with were no longer with the company, and ...

Okay, so, basically, RL drama. But at least the floor of the house was slowly having bare concrete replaced with tile. Also, the back part of the house was essentially rebuilt now. (They'd discovered that the back extension was basically untreated wooden siding nailed directly onto studs -- no plywood, no house wrap, no insulation.) More $$$. But at least the rebuilt section is a lot nicer.

A bit of Warcraft provided some welcome escapism.

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The Tuskarr and the Musicbox
One silly little feature in Dragonflight is that there's a new, weird recipe called "Blubbery Muffin." Eating it gives you an appearance buff of a randomly selected Tuskarr model for a few minutes. Load up on Blubbery Muffins, and you can keep it going for quite a while, though you'll be doing outfit changes each time. A nice fellow was taking advantage of this to roleplay being a Tuskarr merchant selling items in Stormwind.



Worg-Woof Plushy for Sale
A worgen vendor at the Stormwind harbor market sold (among other things) a plush likeness of her worg-wolf sidekick.



The Captain Returns Fire
A void elf ship's captain does battle in the Waking Shore with an enchanted flintlock, blasting away at some pesky djaradin.



Magmammoth Reentry
Some creative adventurers used a chain of portals to try to temporarily apprehend a magmammoth in the Waking Shores, in hopes of then pulling it out of the portal-cycle and capturing it. Unfortunately, it had built up so much momentum that when they disabled one of the portals to pull it out, it shot off into the sky ... and then quite some time later, while the adventurers were distracted with other things, came BACK, hurtling at meteoric speed. Oops. It was a very bad day for the magmammoth.



Serious Pandaren Noodles
One of the problems about trying to draw an MMO character portrait based solely on the character's in-game appearance is that: a) you can't tell what "IC-only" details the player imagines should be incorporated into the character's look that simply aren't *possible* with the game model, and b) you can't tell what sort of demeanor the character has and hence what sorts of poses would be appropriate.

In this case, when I originally drew this, I had the Pandaren chef smiling and waving cheerily ... which, as it turns out, is totally NOT something he would do, because he's a serious, taciturn fellow who buries himself in his work and doesn't waste time on such frivolities. "Here are your noodles," and that's that.

Well, I salvaged my work (I work in layers, thank goodness) some time later, and made him look a bit more serious -- and fixed a few cosmetic details while I was at it.



The Little Drake
Recent RP session, full of complete tangents, with one little bit roughly paraphrased as:

Dracthyr PC: "There are duckies? I want to pet a ducky!"

GM: "Roll Animal Handling."

Dracthyr Player: (rolls ridiculously high)

GM: "You have a happy ducky -- er, duck -- snoozing in your arms."

Dracthyr PC: "D'awwwwwww! ;_; "



Jani's Fortune
A Child of Jani saurid with an affinity for nature magic brings a magical blossom to life in the Emerald Gardens of the Dragon Isles.

I had a lot of fun drawing this guy.



A Stardrop is Born
A little golden fae dragon is born from a gold-and-white rose blossom. (Actually, I have no idea where little sprite-darters come from, but in the RP session, the GM went with this. I mean, lore-wise, I think dryads are born from magic acorns or some-such, so I guess that fits as well as anything, right?)




Lightforged Bunny
This doodle was spawned from a silly misunderstanding I had of someone's new "chibi" icon of a Draenei Lightforged character. (The way the circle logo chopped off the depiction of her horns made it look like they were bunny ears, and the face was very "chibi" simplified, so I mistook the image for a cartoon rabbit, figuring it had something to do with the Year of the Rabbit. I was wrong! But I did this silly doodle of the player's Draenei character as a bunny anyway.)




Modeling Winter Trees
Revisiting a portrait of a void elf clothier character, here's another picture of the character a year later (though I guess lore-wise, with the expansion "time skip," it's four years later? or how does that work?) sporting a different dress, this one dubbed "Winter Trees."



Hitching a Ride
Steve the Lizard makes a new duckling friend in the Emerald Gardens of the Dragon Isles.

That's another oddity about the whole Dragonflight release lore business: There is a "time leap" of about 3 years. Normally there's this weird time warp going on where effectively time in the game crawls along at a snail's pace compared to real life -- I think it's something like the timeline only advances one year per expansion, so if an expansion comes out roughly every two years, that's one game year per two real years, but every REAL year we're celebrating the holidays and such. Keeping track of passage of time for RP purposes is a royal pain, so for various reasons it's often treated in a very hand-wavy "please don't think too hard about it" manner.

Well, this time there was a more noticeable jump, and a lot of folks went on about just what they would have been up to and what would have changed in the intervening time. Well, as for Steve, he got "LORGE." He's no longer pocket-sized. Now he's large enough to have a duckling ride on his head. LORGE, I say!



The Draenei and the Soggy Gnoll
During a recent RP session, the Draenei artificer in the party, who specializes in the creation of portals, took advantage of a nearby waterfall to create a distraction for the attacking gnolls by redirecting its water at them (AKA firehose effect). When one of the gnolls was captured, and he still had some duration left on his portal, he decided that the gnoll badly needed a bath. "Stop it! Stop it PUH-LEEEZE! Me talk! ME TALLLLLLK!" (ANYTHING but a BATH!)




Kezan Lime Pie
Pie, made with Kezan limes! (Because there are no Florida Keys in Azeroth, hence no "key limes," so I thought I'd just substitute in the goblin island homeland.) In the background is an imagined Kezan coastline, with a goblin party boat. I suppose there SHOULD be more in the way of smoke, oil spills, garish signs, and the occasional explosion, for the proper effect, but this was done as an illustration for a recipe article on how to make "kezan" lime pie, so I figured the overall image should at least pretend to be appetizing.

I adore the goblin party boat. Among various other things, I wish it were possible to have a boat "vehicle" and take passengers along. (Yeah, sure, there's the "love boat" toy, but that's of annoyingly short duration, etc.)