Ehlonna (DnD Goddess)

First of a series of five for my final project in Concepts 2; my self-designed project is to illustrate a selection of the deities from the Dungeons and Dragons universe in the tradition of medieval saint icons and images.

Here we have Ehlonna, the neutral good goddess of the woodlands. She represents balance, peace, and the natural world, uninterrupted. According to the Player's Handbook (I'm not looking at the deities book for this project, so as not to color my interpretations), her worshipers include elves, half-elves, rangers, druids, and those who live or make their livings in the woods. For this piece I chose to represent her as a traditional medieval hermaphrodite, an allegorical figure that represent balance by showing a single being that contains the range of human features. The hermaphrodite of this type of imagery has essentially two complete bodies, one male and one female, connected somewhere in the vicinity of the hip or ribcage. They're usually accompanied by other symbols of elements in balance, like the sun and moon, water and fire, or predators and prey at peace. I chose to take a light palette for this, along with simple costuming, to give the impression of light and purity. The backlighting was tricky to paint, but I wanted to give the figure a sense of luminescence even though technically the 'halo' is the light source. The textures applied to this are a collage of my own creation, which includes several prints of actual medieval images and a free texture from bittbox.