I recently had the huge privilege of working on the Season 4 Cover Art for the Actual Play Podcast @crudelydrawnswords​ (listen here!! or on your podcatcher of choice).

Part of that process was helping design new outfits for The Hawks and I just want to talk about my thoughts through that process!





First, I think the evolution of my personal designs for them is important because it fully informs where we ended up, I think.

When I first considered doing fan art I looked around for any existing fan art, this is something I always do, I think maybe to feel like I’m not WAY off base? (Which is super silly, get off base with fan art! That’s why it’s fan art!) But I do it.

I think this piece of art by CDS’s own Magnus (follow Mag on twitter!) was if not THE first, one of the very first pieces I saw:

This image really heavily played into how I drew The Hawks. ESPECIALLY the color pallets. There are some real obvious similarities between this and where I ended up for a couple reasons.

Despite the changes I’ve made to their designs I’ve always thought it was important to keep their main colors intact, Bambari in browns, Tristan in reds, Percy in stark silver, and Enigma in green.

Keeping their colors consistent has been a specific choice on my part, largely to pay homage to this specific image, and partially for visual consistency. Meaning, even if I messed with the structure of the outfit, the vibe would remain (hopefully).

I think this is most obvious with every group and “special” group art I’ve done of The Hawks. Here’s a couple examples of what I mean by “different structure, same vibe”:

The two pieces have very different fashion choices, but the intent was to remain true to the characters through the use of color.

Percy: Well put together with colors that invoke the sky just before a storm, combined with over-polished silver.

Tristian: Reds and blacks, with pieces that are very flashy.

Enigma: Green and simple, something easy to move in. The one time I drew her in a skirt I tried to make it obvious that it was as easy to move in as possible.

Bambri: Browns, simple, fabric textures that are basic, no attempts to evoke fancy fabric.

Color, for me, does a lot of heavy lifting when I draw The Hawks, the colors are always a conscious choice, even down to the little stuff like “How sunburned should Tristan be?” “Which of them should have similar eye colors?”. I mention this, because it was a factor I very much kept in mind when designing the Season 4 art.

Sooo, with all that in mind, let’s chat about the outfit drafts I came up with! Shout out to Ben (twitter here!) who was my point of contact for all of this. He had a very clear vision for what the energy of the cover art should be, as well as passed on the style references from The Hawks.

We’ll start with Percy, I’m just going to cut and paste the brief I got from Ben:

Percy will look less the knight in shining armour. The armour is tarnished, he is wearing tattered robes over it, he perhaps looks a little careworn but there is focus in him as well.

He also sent a couple of reference pics that were very influential. With those together I ended up with these 4 variations:

There’s some real difference from 1 to 4. The thoughts I had were along the lines of:

1: Very close to the reference image I liked most

2: Fun, funky, more visual interest and still very much showing off his Paladin garb.

3: Low key, with still a touch of the regal vibe I try to insert into him (it’s the cape.)

4: VERY MUCH PALLY, despite liking this choice, It is def the furthest from the reference I was sent. I included because I wanted to make sure there was still the option of showing off his Pally side.

In each of the 4 designs there is either an obvious scarf or (in the case of 1) the hint of a scarf shape. A scarf was not a feature of his design before this, it was a feature of the design I had most recently landed on for Bambari. It was VERY important to me to have SOME sort of visual touch that connected the two.

You can also see I went for similar brown shades and Fabric Styles, again, it was absolutely on purpose to draw a connection between the two.

Onto Tristan!

Again, from Ben:

I think we have already raised the likelihood of Tristan being dressed absolutely in the style of “Welcome To The Black Parade” era MCR.



I wish I could describe the feeling I had when I read this. It was intense, visceral, joy. Not only were MCR a part of my heavy rotation through High School, but The Black Parade is so visually “my shit” it’s not funny. If I could draw every character in a Marching Band Inspired Outfit I would 1000% do it.

The downside of this specifically, is there aren’t a TON of variations to play with. So, I mostly went wild with Jackets.

I wanted to make sure I kept the very ornate feel, while also staying true to marching band. For folks that were part of marching band (waddup), you’ll notice that the pants in 1 and 3 are absolutely the baggy look that that is the most true to the vibe, but they aren’t the most true to Tristan T. Wilde, world famous bard.

One of the extra variations of this I sent off for approval had red accents, but I’ll be honest, I’m glad that the final choice was for all sliver and white. Choosing to remove the red from his outfit completely sends a big visual message about where his character is at currently.

You can see in all 4 options the coat has some form of sharp arrow style cut. I was important to me to keep him from looking boxy, and keep his outfits looking very specifically Fit For Him.





And Enigma! Once more from Ben:

I don’t have a definite visual reference for Enigma yet, but she is a Ranger now. And she has a magpie.



So. Uh. Initially that isn’t a lot to go on. But, I’ve been drawing Enigma for A WHILE, I felt confidant that I could direct myself to something that was very “Authentic” Ranger.

After about 9000 google searches, I came up with 4 ideas.

Boy howdy. I think her’s may be the most diverse, style wise. I’ll be honest, I love all of these. There are certainly a couple who are less Her than I would normally go for, but in each of them, I tried to make sure there were Obvious Engima Touches.

3 is perhaps the least interesting, as it was the most similar to how I had already been drawing her.

1 & 2 (and a little bit 4) were an excuse to draw muscle definition, no doubt, don’t @ me, I think it’s important to note that by this point I had been binging F@TT, so 1 is ABSOLUTELY inspired by art I have seen of Hella, you are free to @ me about that. thank you.

ANYWAY, with all of these I again considered the fact that even if she was no longer a rogue, she wouldn’t be giving up her amazing parkour skills, so she would still need to flip about.

2 & 4 were designed specifically with that in mind, as in: What will look coolest when she’s flippin’ around?

And if you’re looking at any of these and thinking: Hm, there are some design elements here that I used for Bambari’s design, again you are correct. I was less concerned with making the connection obvious here than I was with Percy, but I still wanted to insert some of that.

Later, Ben mentioned that if we could a little more Aloy from HZD that would be ideal.









SO! HOW DID ALL OF THAT COME TOGETHER?

I’m glad you asked.

I’m so glad that even with these changes I was able to keep most of the color standards for The Hawks.

Enigma is still in green.

Percy still has that silver, even if it isn’t as bright.

Tristan no longer has red, but my hope is that his attitude still stands out.

They’ve been through a lot, but they are still them.

I will admit, there was a selfish part of me that was truly glad with the choices the players made here. Despite really loving all of the outfit choices, these were my favorite from a narrative arc standpoint and also from a re-draw-ability standpoint.





If you’ve made it this far… Shit dude.

Thank you.

I have a lot of feelings about this show and I still can’t really believe I was asked to do this. It was a delight working with Ben to make this vision into a reality.





The Hawks truly are rad as heck.