Porcelain Dolly

Hoo boy, this one I'm actually pretty happy with. I mean, yeah, I probably should go back in and deepen the shadows, but I'm afraid to overwork it...

Plain background here: [link]
Lineart here: [link]

This is one of a handful of characters I have created for use in such things as MMOs, RPGs, etc. She's one of my favorites, too, though I feel bad for the crappy past she had...then again, it's one of the most in-depth pasts any of my characters have, so it's not so bad, in a sense. She was initially created in World of Warcraft as a Forsaken mage (thus the glowing yellow eye), but I've managed to recreate her as a halfling sorceror in Dungeons & Dragons Online, and a mage elf in Dragon Age: Origins (her odd skin and hair colors recreated with the help of shiny, shiny mods).

Her name is Doronorine and, long story short-ish, she was adopted by spoiled rich folk and (abused and mis)treated as a live doll--hence her nickname, Dolly, and the porcelain mask over her face. After one thing or another happens (depending on the world and what she is), she is abandoned out at sea and develops a paralyzing fear of water (or just the ocean with a general dislike of water, if water is completely unavoidable in the game). Being lost at sea tinted her skin green and her hair blue-green (because I said so), and got seaweed permanently stuck in her hair. Oh, and you can't see it very well since the mask is in the way, but there are parts of her face where her skin had been cut and peeled off, but would not regrow when her adoptee tried to practice healing skills on it (because of the Forsaken plague in WoW as well as said adoptee's abysmal healing skills; in other games, the latter is the sole reason), so leather was sewn on in place of flesh. The mask also covers the fact that her right (our left) eye is missing (having also been removed and unable to be healed).

The lineart for this picture was drawn with a mechanical pencil, then scanned and colored in photoshop on and off over the course of a couple weeks, using a lit-up 3d model I fashioned in DAZ 3D as a reference for the shadows. The background is a stretched and filtered screenshot from the opening credits for the anime Yami no Matsuei (or, in English, Descendants of Darkness). Dolly's background and character were, in fact, not inspired by Muraki (who is in the screenshot, though covered); it's just a lucky break he was treated as a doll in his youth, as well. This was also the easiest way I found to get a background full of porcelain dolls--I decided to be lazy and really didn't want to draw a whole bunch all by hand.

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