Wandering Shade: Shade Concept Art (Patreon)

Tssth... Krr... Bleep!

Conceptual Insight Function: [ACTIVE]

Shade is such a delicious little twink. When we first started brainstorming for this project, MISSMAJORED and I soon realised who the main characters were, and how size difference would play a role in that. Below is MISSMAJORED's blurb on Shade...

Shade! Our spitty, hauty, loyal man-witch on a journey for ancient magicks.

I wanted Shade to feel wild, and "tainted" by magic hence the dark fingertips as an homage to The Scarlet Witch and various others. His clothing is an impractical mess of cloth in various stages of tattered and ripped disarray. I think the lack of "protective" clothing Shade wears hints to his confidence, and bravado in tackling the world around him - he knows his own strength and power, and doesn't feel the need to bundle up to protect himself when his magicks and his cunning are enough.

The Weeping Willow Clan are, in-world, a very grounded but mystical group of people who live within the protective surroundings of a mass of willow trees - I used this aesthetic to influence his colour scheme, which Dee dreamed up as various hues of earthy, de-saturated greens, teals, powder blues, and near-black. This is in direct contrast to the antagonizing clan, The Ashen Tusk, who we'll feature in a couple of weeks!

Beneath his ragged, impractical clothing is a runic system scarred into his skin. I started developing the alphabet for our world to build upon, which was really just a smash-job of Norse runes and cuneiform writings (a great idea from Miguel!) which I think looks original enough to be palatable but simple enough for me to draw consistently.

The script is very much done, and the way Shade presents himself both in and out of combat... and sexually... it's uh... 👀

Also, there is a nude-version of this concept art for our Surge Differentiators and tiers above. 😏

- Miguel