LordBob's commissionned work

[Adamant14]

Great.

[beetlenaut]

She's not beautiful now, but you can see that she probably was. Good trick pulling that off.

[vultraz]

Oo I like

[cKomuHKa]

Don't like her head at all. Big facial part and low forehead - it's not the aristocratic proportion. Straight looking eyes dont expresses the arrogance. And a long, thin neck contrasts with her rude face.

I would not have married the daughter of this woman.

[doofus-01]

The only thing I'd want to change is the folds at the corner of her mouth - they seem a bit like cartoon representations, unlike everything else which you did so well. The effect, to my eyes at least, is that it looks like she is drooling blood or red wine. If you wanted to give her "old mouth", maybe giving her thinner or less lush lips would work better than such severe folds in puffy flesh?

[thespaceinvader]

She's not beautiful now, but you can see that she probably was. Good trick pulling that off.

My thought entirely - and I really like that in this sort of character.

[vultraz]

She's not beautiful now, but you can see that she probably was. Good trick pulling that off.

My thought entirely - and I really like that in this sort of character.

She was, if the story art is to judge.

[tr0ll]

Well i can see where Li'sar gets the long neck and good forehead. I would love to see a happier or at least younger Asheviere. So far she is a character without (canonical) roots but a major force in HttT, with related fallout in one or two other campaigns.

[homunculus]

Makes the point quite well, and the soft front shadow is cool.

Is the shadow on the forehead darkened too much by the wrinkles, compared to the lower part of the face?
Judging by those forehead wrinkles, she could be 80.

A miniscule highlight seems to mess up the shape of her belly under the left arm.

[Jetrel]

I think this is an excellent piece of work, the only concern I have is it appears kinda isolated; kinda ... "out of left field". It's very striking, as it should be - it's appropriate, but it does feel disconnected from the rest of the costume design ... and I don't think that's actually any fault of its own. So this is not a concern I say as any sort of "critique" - I think this portrait is perfect, and I'm not saying something bad about it in particular.

I think the problem is simply that we don't have enough noblewomen in wesnoth; as visible speaking characters. If we had a few more at some point, they'd establish a nice "body of work" showing what culture this comes from - especially if some of these women were petty nobility doing lesser imitations of the fashions at court. Sort of a missing link, if you will. So I'd keep this in mind when we get to future noblewoman characters - to give them costumes that feel like they're from the same culture.

(a related link I found: )
http://www.fashion-era.com/hats-hair/ha ... lthrop.htm



So - as a long term thought, in the not too distant future, we're going to be done with all portraits for all mainline campaigns, and basically all of our generic unit portraits. This will leave us wide open to do other things - I propose that one very useful thing to do, would be to make a body of generic non-combatant people, because they'd be enormously useful as stock characters in campaigns. Portraits, and unit sprites. People of all walks of life - merchants, noblemen, tradesmen, male and female. Also - children. These would be useful for all sorts of missions; they would chiefly be useful for cutscenes, but would also be useful for things like escort missions, guarding missions, and also as "worker units"; whether for a wesnoth mission where you protect masons whilst they build a wall, or for a user-mod which turns this into something more like an RPG or a Civ-alike.

I don't think these would be necessary for anything but a scant few races; the number of them we made would be heavily weighted towards the civilian diversity of a race. Humans far and away would be the majority, followed by elves and dwarves. Some races, like trolls and undead, would need none at all, since their basic combat units serve as such.

Just a mere 10 such humans would give campaign-makers a huge palette to work from.

[Iris]

I’m just going to say that she looks to me like a weird cross between Maleficient from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and the evil stepmother from Cinderella (Disney’s too, yep), and I’ll never be able to take this character seriously. Not that HttT’s The Battle for Wesnoth scenario’s prose and gameplay have ever done a good job at that anyway.

Just my two fictional CLP cents (which are worth far less than U.S. cents at the moment, and hence never used as actual currency).

Please don’t eat me.

[Zalminen]

I'd say she looks exactly like I'd have expected after playing through the campaign.
Great job!

[Drakefriend]

I think this is an excellent piece of work, the only concern I have is it appears kinda isolated; kinda ... "out of left field". It's very striking, as it should be - it's appropriate, but it does feel disconnected from the rest of the costume design ... and I don't think that's actually any fault of its own. So this is not a concern I say as any sort of "critique" - I think this portrait is perfect, and I'm not saying something bad about it in particular.

I think the problem is simply that we don't have enough noblewomen in wesnoth; as visible speaking characters. If we had a few more at some point, they'd establish a nice "body of work" showing what culture this comes from - especially if some of these women were petty nobility doing lesser imitations of the fashions at court. Sort of a missing link, if you will. So I'd keep this in mind when we get to future noblewoman characters - to give them costumes that feel like they're from the same culture.

(a related link I found: )
http://www.fashion-era.com/hats-hair/ha ... lthrop.htm



So - as a long term thought, in the not too distant future, we're going to be done with all portraits for all mainline campaigns, and basically all of our generic unit portraits. This will leave us wide open to do other things - I propose that one very useful thing to do, would be to make a body of generic non-combatant people, because they'd be enormously useful as stock characters in campaigns. Portraits, and unit sprites. People of all walks of life - merchants, noblemen, tradesmen, male and female. Also - children. These would be useful for all sorts of missions; they would chiefly be useful for cutscenes, but would also be useful for things like escort missions, guarding missions, and also as "worker units"; whether for a wesnoth mission where you protect masons whilst they build a wall, or for a user-mod which turns this into something more like an RPG or a Civ-alike.

I don't think these would be necessary for anything but a scant few races; the number of them we made would be heavily weighted towards the civilian diversity of a race. Humans far and away would be the majority, followed by elves and dwarves. Some races, like trolls and undead, would need none at all, since their basic combat units serve as such.

Just a mere 10 such humans would give campaign-makers a huge palette to work from.

I really like this idea.

[LordBob]

In response to various comments: to be honest, I'm not fully satisfied with her face, of which I should propose an alternate soon enough. Painting a lifelike portrait of an actual person is difficult already, but breathing character into a fictional face requires a knack - and experience as a portraitist - that I currently lack.

I’m just going to say that she looks to me like a weird cross between Maleficient from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and the evil stepmother from Cinderella (Disney’s too, yep), and I’ll never be able to take this character seriously. Not that HttT’s The Battle for Wesnoth scenario’s prose and gameplay have ever done a good job at that anyway.

Now that you mention it, the resemblance is striking (the headgear and collar, I guess). Ironically I did research some Disney works beforehand, but it was Cruella De Vil that had caught my attention ; until you brought them up, I had not seen the above characters for ages. Which is both frightening and a shame : had I been aware of this earlier, I would have tweaked the design in order to remove those similarities.
But then, what you describe is basically who she is ingame. What would you suggest that could make the character more credible?

I think the problem is simply that we don't have enough noblewomen in wesnoth {...} So - as a long term thought, in the not too distant future, we're going to be done with all portraits for all mainline campaigns, and basically all of our generic unit portraits. This will leave us wide open to do other things - I propose that one very useful thing to do, would be to make a body of generic non-combatant people,

I wholeheartedly agree. Civilians would be a great addition to our generic cast, and would also pave the way for some really interesting portraits

[Iris]

Now that you mention it, the resemblance is striking (the headgear and collar, I guess). Ironically I did research some Disney works beforehand, but it was Cruella De Vil that had caught my attention ; until you brought them up, I had not seen the above characters for ages. Which is both frightening and a shame : had I been aware of this earlier, I would have tweaked the design in order to remove those similarities.
But then, what you describe is basically who she is ingame. What would you suggest that could make the character more credible?

I hardly have any suggestions that wouldn’t involve rewriting the entirety of HttT and making sure The Battle for Wesnoth provides a more climatic showdown instead of a deceptive skirmish that’s pretty much a walk in the park for any player with enough gold and recalls; as well as making sure Asheviere has more depth than being that one unit on the game map that you have to and can defeat with any random unit after every other enemy leader has exhausted their supplies or has been slain. But for the latter point, we would probably need to feature her onscreen in at least another mainline campaign.

Art-wise, I cannot provide any suggestions because I am not an artist, and I do not feel comfortable with suggesting or demanding changes for artwork commissioned by someone else. I am not very good at making fancy characters either, as pretty much everyone who has seen my pixel ‘products’ can see.