Hotara's Mourning

Hotara knelt near the large stone he had placed there in the grass years ago, and which had remained undisturbed ever since. He had still been a hatchling then. During the years that had passed he had grown stronger in body and mind through training. But he still visited the stone every year and mourned the death of the parents he never knew, who had been killed before he had even hatched. The stone didn’t even mark the place where they were buried. But still he visited it–always when he was alone–to be with them in the only way that he could. “Mother,” he prayed in his heart, “Father…”

My part of an art-trade with . I don’t know Hotara’s whole story, so I hope he will forgive me for taking some artistic liberties in the image and the above description. This is an image of Hotara as an adolescent. Not quite as buff and chiseled as his adult self ([link]) but getting there. I tried a new inking technique on this one. Usually I go over my pencil sketch in pen and then scan that in and color in photoshop, which usually works quite well, except I sometimes get dark patches from the texture of the paper that are hard to remove. In this one, I used the pen tool to in photoshop to ink my original sketch. Much thanks to for the tutorial ([link]). I really like it! It makes the lines very crisp and precise. It still needs work, because I need to practice getting the lines to taper when and how much I want them to, but like all things that will come with time. Please forgive the strange background… it’s supposed to look like the trunks of trees in a thick forest. I’m not sure if that’s how it comes off or not.

3/31/12 - UPDATE: I blurred the background some and it looks a lot better than it did before in my opinion. Now those could actually be tree trunks off in the distance.

Hotara is (c)