I’ve been very slowly going through an assortment of random old things from one of the upstairs bookshelves, trying to decide what I wanted to keep and what I didn’t. One of the things in this assortment was a “sketch diary” type notebook, dating from the era of the original Murkworks, during that short span of time when I was playing around with colored pencils and trying to figure out how to draw.

I only had sketches on the first three pages of the notebook, which just goes to show you how far I got with that attempt at drawing. Since I haven’t touched the thing since–and we’re talking well over 15, maybe over 20 years here–I decided to recycle the sketchbook.

But not before scanning in the sketches. I wanted to keep them for posterity, particularly since they’re mostly attempts at drawing Two Moons characters. And I wanted to share them here!

(Editing to add: Dreamwidth readers, you’ll want to click over to annathepiper.org to actually see the pictures. The plugin I’m using for rendering galleries doesn’t play well with being crossposted to Dreamwidth, sorry about that!)

These are in the order they were in the sketchbook. The hand sketch was on the same page as the first take at Rillwhisper, a page which also included some faint attempts to sketch in Rill’s full body, but not enough to be worth preserving in these crops.

The second attempt at Rill was closer to how she looked on the character sheet I had from her way back when in our Elfquest game in Kentucky. Both attempts at her, however, failed rather badly at her hand. Which is why I’m pretty sure I’d tried to sketch what my own hand looked like balled into a light fist.

The last sketch in the set has got to be an attempt at drawing Ynderra of Lostholt, although I’m not a hundred percent sure of that, and I didn’t play her in the 90s. But the overall look of the character doesn’t match anybody else I ever played, nor anybody who was in Willowholt at the time.

Overall, this is about what I usually get when I draw freeform. Not too bad for just playing around, and I do like what I was doing with Rill’s hair in both sketches. (Although I still liked her hair better in her character sheet sketch, which is what I used to make the Dreamwidth/LJ icon I have for her.)

It would be interesting to see if I could do something similar to this in Procreate on the iPad.