Summon Mana by @smarle (Staci/Nadia)

RPGamer's having a huge fanart contest this year, and this is my submission for the second round! The rules were to either take an RPG character and transform him or her into a summon creature or to take an existing summon creature and redesign it. I got the idea pretty quickly to use Martel/Mana from Tales of Symphonia and transform her into a dryad, since she has strong attachments to the Giant Kharlon Tree in the game. The top half of her is her normal humanoid character design, while the bottom half is a tree, much like the spirit Dryad from the Seiken Densetsu series. She's supposed to be pretty much a replacement for Maxwell (the elemental summon spirit), since mana rules all the elements.

I sketched out the image I had in my head as best I could, and I was really happy with how it came out. Over a few weeks, I gradually refined the picture. Unfortunately, I only had less than a week for the inking and CGing... ^^;;;; The inking went terribly--I made a lot of mistakes. I wound up spending about 8 hours in Photoshop repairing my mistakes and smoothing things out... ^^;; The CGing took three days of about 8 hours each as well... -_- Very exhausting work!

Unfortunately, due to waiting till the last week and having to rush, a lot of ideas I had wound up getting scrapped. I'd wanted to add more leaves to her hair and have her tree body sprouting from the Great Seed of the Giant Kharlon Tree. I was also thinking about adding some magical effects coming from her staff. I would've also liked to have spent more leisurely time with the CGing, detail her hair some more, and do better folds with her clothing. Her face didn't quite come out as I'd hoped, either, particularly the eyes.

I think her clothing, skin, and tree form came out pretty well, though. I like the CLAMP-ish way I drew the wings on her staff, too... ^-^ And this is probably the best action pose I've drawn thus far... ^^;;;