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(UnHeavenly Hosts Development Journal 4)
You can see past dev journals for my upcoming book/comic book (tbd) UnHeavenly Hosts here.
For this installment, we’re looking at Layla Anwar aka Lady Scarab. She’s the trusted bodyguard of Magiko the Mummy Magician… and a whole lot more!
About Lady Scarab
Here’s the description from the pitch document: A stunning Egyptian beauty. Although her cover is as the Mummy’s lovely assistant, Layla is a highly trained fighter, devoted to protecting her ancestor, whom she calls “grandfather.” Sheltered for most of her life, training to become Khety’s guard, she’s eager to experience new things and is constantly spurring the Mummy Magician into action. In addition to her fighting skills, Layla has advanced psychic powers. A mysterious trait that runs in her family and may be linked to her ancestor’s magical artifact.
Developing Lady Scarab
I’m going to be honest. I don’t really remember how Lady Scarab was conceived. Or, rather, the exact order of things. The original design drawing (below) for her dates back to 2016. I’ve always loved Egyptian stuff, and obviously I’m not unique in that. If memory serves, I liked the idea of Magiko having a lovely assistant who was also his bodyguard. My original idea was for her to be a regular human who was trained to defend her ancestor. However, I’m a fan of the old 80s line Sectaurs, and I generally enjoy drawing insect people. So, I dreamed up this insect form that Layla can change into. I think it gives her a little more visual interest. Also, this worked out well because there is a regular old human who is a member of the group. But more on her another time. Some of her design owes something to the alien designs I did for ELA, my short sci-fi comic.
The Art Process
For the new image I created for this post, I was again experimenting with using grayscale to provide the tones and I did this first as I have been. However, instead of setting the color layers in the document to overlay or multiply or what have you, I actually set the graytone layers on top of the color, and used a mix of overlay and soft light settings for those layers. I really like the results. I feel like this comes closest to getting the effect I want without feeling muddy. That being said, I’m still REALLY liking the look of the grayscale versions:
This is the first time I’d ever tried drawing Layla Anwar. I found a good reference image that had the sort of attitude I wanted from her clothing-wise, so that helped a lot. I want Layla to look imposing in her human form, too. I am trying to decide how large to make the scarab necklace. We’ll see. On the one hand, this is a comic book. I don’t think it’s too bad to have it be obvious. But it might be a little TOO huge here.
