Lanos, Sworn Sword of the Hold

A piece I've been working on on and off since roughly January 2023. 2022 and 2023 marked a period of both undergoing and lengthily recovering from thumb surgery for me, which proved to be an especially long process of learning how to adjust to a now much more stress-sensitive right hand. Around January 2024 was when I finally started to feel as if the process was at its end. During this time, I put any inspiration I couldn't use on dedicated drawing sessions into personal worldbuilding inspired by the Souls games; Lanos here is one of the first characters whose design I've realized based off said writing.

I was also mostly dissatisfied with the quality of my character design work so far, and wanted to push to see how far I could go with my current skillset when it came to creating a Souls-like character concept. This big burly boy was as much a successful portfolio piece as it was a way for me to prove to myself that I sell myself short a lot of the time, so it was also a great exercise in self-confidence.