Original Concept Art for Children of Eldair
Eldair has been in development for a long time. Let's take a look at how things have changed!
In 2011, I was nearing graduation with a BFA in Graphic Design and Illustration at Southern Utah University. As a BFA graduate in the program, I was required to do a BFA project, which I had been looking forward to my whole college career. I knew I wanted to do a comic, as I felt comics were a great marriage of graphic design and illustration. And Children of Eldair seemed like the perfect pick.
I had been working on Eldair (Originally Eldar) for many years as a novel, slowly simmering and developing throughout my adolescence and into adulthood. I had lots of concept art I had drawn over the years as I developed the story and I felt it would be a fun story to tell visually.
I worked hard, drawing the first 16 pages as a comic book in a meticulous, realistic art nouveau style. It was good, but it wasn’t outstanding. And I wanted to create something outstanding. What would make this world seem bigger? What would make me stand out as a possible candidate for a concept artist position? Well, a concept art section, of course!
I compiled many of the development sketches I had done up to that point and created a few new ones to put into the back of the book. When it was completed, I was really proud of what I had completed.
What surprised me the most was when it was all done, is that it wasn’t the comic pages that caught the attention of the students, professors, and art directors, it was the concept art. It surprised me because this was back when anime and manga was not considered “real art,” so I thought for sure that people would prefer the realistic comic pages over my anime influenced concept art. So, when people gushed over my natural art style instead of what I thought people wanted, it was incredibly liberating! People liked my art the way it was!
This was the catalyst that turned Children of Eldair into a webcomic. I enjoyed the project so much that I decided to keep going with it. And over a decade later, here we are!
I thought I had lost the original files for this BFA project forever, so you can imagine how ecstatic I was when I randomly found them on an old flash drive last year! I wanted to share these concept pages with you so you can see how things have changed and developed over time—and see what has stayed the same!
(I’ll probably share the original comic pages as well, but that will be in a different post.)
So here you go! The original concept art of Children of Eldair from 2011! Paid subscribers have access to the full 16 pages here with commentary.
Iva, Indri, and Embera
Designs for Iva, Indri, and Embera. These were not the first concept designs for these three girls, but the ones that I had in mind when I started the comic in 2011. The first time I drew these three was probably back in 2003 when I was in 7th grade, but bizarrely, I don’t think their designs changed a whole lot over that time. They even kept their original names! (Though I debated a lot on Indri’s, but couldn’t come up with anything better so it stuck. Lol) However, their elvan elements did change as Iva was originally the element of earth, Indri was fire, and Embera was wind.
Sorcerers
I put a lot of thought into the sorcerer culture early on as Koe is the first character we’d see in the comic. Because we’d end up in a very long vision and not get back to the sorcerer culture for a long time, I wanted to make sure they had a strong visual language to differentiate themselves from the other races. Plus, I just had a lot of fun with this! I love all the many layers that they wear.
As much as I love those braids, I’m not sure I’ll have the patience to draw them when we get back to the present. They take FOREVER to draw. Haha! So we’ll see if that hairstyle survives to when we get back to the present.
Since drawing this, I’ve added quite a few more runes to the alphabet, and I’ve developed the magic system a bit more. But for the most part, this is actually pretty accurate to where the story stands currently. So accurate that I needed to spoiler shield some of Koe’s page!
What’s interesting about this though, is I actually wrote some general information about the world from the Sorcerer’s perspective. The idea that the sorcerer’s were the first creation, then changelings, humans, elves, and then fairies is Sorcerer lore, but not the actual history of the world. The first people to inhabit the world were sorcerers, but all the races (other than fairies) are just split off from them, much like races in our own world. Changeling’s are just sorcerers with dark skin and a different magic system. And elves are just sorcerers with long pointy ears, and humans are short with round ears. But I guess that doesn’t seem as magical and cool. XD
