Preservers of River Twine Holt

(Original posted in 2007.)

Relatively few fan artists seem to do Preservers, when they're doing EQ art. I wonder why that is? I mean, they're kind of fun to do -- very exaggerated and cartoony, and bright and cheerful. And for me, they're such an integral part of the EQ world.

This is RiverTwine Holt's full complement of Preservers. We needed a reference pic for all of them, so I finally got around to doing this. I didn't come up with the designs or personalities for any of them (though in a few cases, I did come up with the hats), I was just drawing what was already established/described.

I'm not 100% happy with the composition of this. What seemed like a good idea in theory (when I was drawing each one separately, except for the two in the middle) irked me when I put it all together in the end. I wish I had done another of them flying somehow. I feel like this spread them out too far, and resulted in too much dead white space. (Which I didn't try to put a background on, because it's a ref pic, and I didn't want anything to distract from the little bugs.) And it made the branch too long and straight, so that it doesn't look natural. Ah well!

Copic markers, with some post work done in Photoshop.

Update: that branch gets worse and worse the longer I look at it. >_<