Tamaki, the Shadow Soldier

I have held a set of four characters for the world of Lucids in the back of my mind for a long time but have not really developed at all or thought to do anything with them.  I just did not devote much thought to them besides that they would be based on one of four powers: fire, water, lightning, and darkness.  Then, I began to rekindle my interest in the Fire Emblem series and started thinking that I could base their designs somewhat off their original inspiration (which was, by the way, the different evolutions of the Pokemon Eevee) and combine that with the fantasy-world designs of Fire Emblem units.

I decided to work on the shadow girl first.  The fire and water characters are probably not going to be super important, and the lightning one would be the leader, and I wanted to save her for when I start drawing villains for this series.  The shadow girl, however, might be a bit more reluctant than her sisters, and there may be redemption for her yet.

Meet Tamaki, codenamed "The Shadow Soldier".

Tamaki's design started from trying to figure out what class from Fire Emblem would best match the Pokemon Umbreon.  Because Umbreon is generally regarded as the most defensive evolution of Eevee, I initially thought to design her as a General: a unit that wears heavy armor and bears higher defense than most other units in the series.  However, I ended up drawing Tamaki as another Fire Emblem class: a "Halberdier".  Both Generals and Halberdiers are able to wield lances, although Halberdiers ONLY use lances to fight while Generals can use other weapons.  Halberdiers are also faster than Generals and have better resistance to magic, although they fall a little short of Generals in physical defense.  I picked the Halberdier class for Tamaki for the higher resistance (they still maintain good Defense, just not as good as Generals), and because I thought the Halberdier class was more interesting and cooler-looking.

For the colors, I started playing through Earthbound thanks to my week-old Wii U and liked the option at the beginning for your window color, which was named after different flavors: Plain (white), Mint (cyan), Strawberry (pink), Banana (yellow), and Peanut (orange).  Seeing that, I decided to assign one of these flavors to each sister in their group.  Assigning Tamaki the Plain flavor, I decided to make her costume mostly black and white (and gray).  The yellow decorations are there to give a little bit of warmth to her cool-gray armor, but I still tried to keep that a little on the pale side, too.

You may recall from some of my other Lucid drawings (like Ken Thunder) that I often like to give even weapon-wielding Lucids some kind of superpower.  I have mentioned before that Tamaki has something to do with shadows, but I had no idea what I wanted her to do.  Then, when I was trying to just spice up the background, inspiration struck.  Maybe Tamaki could cast up to three shadows that can act independently to aid her in combat or block attacks coming her way.  Each shadow would also be a different color (purple, yellow, or blue) because she tries to personalize them.  This is not a final idea, but it is one with some potential.

I hope you liked this picture.  I am not sure if I will update next week or not.  I am going on vacation, and I might not finish another picture in time.  I will see what I can do, however.

In the meantime, I have not even touched on Tamaki's alluded mission, have I?  Well, my ramblings my contain some clues.  And if you do not see those, remember: some say that a person's eyes are the windows to their soul.