Ref sheet commission for  DrakeSapphire! Boy am I doing a lot of ref sheets lately! I do find them to be rather fun, ESPECIALLY when I get clients like Drake. One of my favorite things to do is design or redesign characters, in a meaningful way for their owner. Drake came to me looking to get something experimental - just a sketch at first, a practice redesign. As we went further, we realized we had something he liked!

I really love to learn about my clients before I go designing a character for them when situations allow for it. I especially love to make them look like their owners too. Luckily Drake was willing to write a fair few emails back and forth, and he had some pictures of himself in his gallery so it was super fun to copy his facial hair, exaggerate his eyebrows and copy his body type. He's a martial artist, so I made the character fit the part. I really enjoyed bringing the characteristics of wolf and crocodile together, as well as retaining some of Drake's features that have followed him throughout all iterations of his design.

The tattoo was a little something extra that I found fun. In his previous design Drake used to have a lot of markings - we consolidated them into a single Maori inspired tattoo design with symbolic meaning:

The Koru spiral on the left depicts new beginnings, growth, and harmony, while the single twist figure eight on the right represents the path of life. The arrow like pattern inside the circle is the dog skin cloak pakati pattern which represents courage, while the parallel lines represent a new challenge and achievement in athleticism. The zigzag patterns are supposed to look like his teeth, and the ends are supposed to look like his tail!

Hopefully he will no longer be mistaked for a dragon!