Tarocheeki's Farm

"This is skritt farm! Grow army to help make new home safer!"

"Grow an army?" Jarus asked incredulously. "How is that possible?"

"Trust me," Tarocheeki grinned. "You'll see!"

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Woo! More Guild Wars 2 art from my favorite part of the Maguuma Jungle! ✨

Just for the sake of context: this skritt, Tarocheeki, runs a farm where he grows these mushroom creatures with the intent of using them to help protect Tarir. At the height of the battle in Tarir, these same mushrooms can be seen on the west quadrant of the city spreading a bunch of spores on the ground. Players transform into mushrooms using these spores and blow up on the Octovine to peel off its slime layers so that it can be vulnerable to attack.

I've said before that Southwatch is my favorite in Auric Basin, but Westwatch takes the cake of having the most colorful cast of non-playable characters. I can't get over how the skritt interact so well with the Exalted and show how multifaceted these golden sentinels can be despite their overly serious nature. I want to explore this further in future artwork.

I was struggling to figure out how I was supposed to go with the style and coloring of this piece. Initially, I wanted to do something akin to watercolor painting like here, but then I thought of just outlining everything in Photoshop first. I painted the base colors and then attempted to do the watercolor technique to add some depth. But the style turned so vastly different and the outline needed to be redone again in pencil (or with a pencil brush) for it to work. At the same time, I also wanted to keep the outline as is and didn't want to start over. Ultimately, I scrapped the watercolor idea and was stumped for a good couple of hours thinking about how to move forward.

I showed the piece to my girlfriend, who seemed to understand what I was trying to do with my art. She suggested I tried doing ink shading techniques for Tarocheeki's body, and to my surprise, it looked very pleasant to look at. This same technique didn't seem to work with everything else in the background, though. I had the cel-shaded art style of Borderlands in mind and after a little more experimenting, I got the aesthetic I wanted in the background. 😌

The band on Tarocheeki's wrist also reads "黄金の谷 (おうごんのたに | ougon no tani)" which just means golden/auric valley. Just really wanted to throw in the map's name written in Japanese on this piece, and thought the wristband was the best place to put it on. 😄