Our very lovable Druid has her origins from one of my very best friends Madison.
Madi and I were part of a D&D group back in college with some friends, and we played through the Elemental Evil Campaign book. Through out college, I desperately wanted to be an artist/character concept artist, and I would draw pictures of all of our characters.
Of course, this was before I had ever worked with clients, and I just went off the base description Madi had given me of “A short, copper haired, half elf Druid”
I didn’t understand the importance of asking more questions, working with her to fully understand how Madi wanted Enna to look. So my first drawings were not quite accurate to how she had imagined her.
Enna is way too white. She is a sailor, she should have been much more tanned, Madi wanted her to have freckles, and she is wearing this weird corset thing, that I don’t even know where that idea came from.
In my original sketch (left) You can see she’s even wearing heels, which I don’t know why, other than at the time, I kind of expected all cool, sexy, hot elf ladies in media to wear heels because that’s what you see on TV.
Overall the design was not ideal, didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and frankly, I wanted to do better.
I still kept drawing the little scenes from our D&D adventures, and eventually I wanted to draw a big group scene. This is where Madi finally told me, “Hey, um, do you think maybe you could, I dunno, not make Enna white??”
So I drew her a lot tanner, but I stuck with the same outfit I already had, mostly because I was not creative enough to think of anything else. I think this is an accurate representation of a middle ground, because I was listening to my “client’s” wishes, and trying to be more accurate to what she wanted, but I was still learning at that point in time.
(I was also learning to get over biases and not draw everyone white, but lets not talk about that….)
What resulted next was I wanted to redo Enna for a birthday present for Madison, and this was also around the time I was really getting into Tarot Cards, and rediscovering Cardcaptor Sakura. So I created a tarot version of Enna.
To date, this is the most accurate version of Enna I had drawn. Madison was totally in love with this version, from the outfit to a more accurate skin tone. I still had a way to go, the face for starters, but that had more to do with my technical skill. In terms of character design, Madi and I agreed that this was the best version of Enna. This is what I based the most current version of Enna on.
