Artist's commentary
Elora ver. 2024
Elora the Faun is a character from Spyro the Dragon Reignited Trilogy. She is one of Spyro’s friends. In this picture I drew her in my style and gave her a modern costume design.
Spyro the Dragon is a long-standing 3D platform video game franchise from the PS1 era. This franchise is an important part of many people’s childhood memory in western countries. But it is not well-known in the eastern countries. The first 3 games of the franchise were remade in 2018 as the Reignited Trilogy, with updated character designs that reflects modern aesthetics.
Elora is a fan-favorite character from the Reignited Trilogy. She appears in the second game. Elora is a faun, which is a half-goat, half human species from greek mythology. But I always interpreted her as an anthropomorphic deer, perhaps because of her fur color.
The first version of this picture was drawn in 2018 — at the time when the Reignited Trilogy was just released. When I was rebuilding my website in 2024, I found the 2018 version really hard to look at — her facial structure and her anatomy felt really off. So I spent a few hours to make some quick adjustments. On top of the facial and anatomy improvement, I also strengthened the blocking and consistency of the figure by color and line adjustments. The light-up overlay layer was removed because the picture seems to be able to hold up without it.
I think the 2024 version was a night-and-day improvement over the 2018 version. The interesting thing is, when you look closely, it is hard to find significant differences between the two in the details. Painting over the 2018 version was an educational experience. It really showcased fancy tricks, and mere detailing alone cannot work without basing on good anatomy and proper color relationships.