Harpies abound

Harpies.

I have some kind of anti-love affair with them. In that, just like Zombies, harpies always end up in my campaigns. Not that they ever get much attention, even though they extremely effective preditors of adventuring parties.

Harpies first appeared in a short campaign I wrote for a weekend game in Jacksonville. It was a desert setting and so I did a lot of research into birds of the desert, the harpy myth(s) and what these two ideas had in common. What came out was more a cross between a dinasour and a naked woman, but the result still says harpy to me. 

I know that very soon I will probably be retooling this version of the creature for some future game. Not that I have a particular idea in mind for a story, so much as I feel like this version of the birdlady isn't quite monsterouse enough. 

Either way, here is series from before I downloaded Paint Tool Sai and the after will be obvious.

 

This was actually drawn some 4-5 years ago, and while I have a few harpy illustrations laying around, this is 1 of my favorites. I purposely made them all pigeon toed as I thought it would be both human and humorus for a feral beastly preditor to have a funny walk. I don't, dark sense of humor I suppose....

This was illistrated in Paint.Net. A program I still use quite a bit. While it retains kind of a quick and sloppy style, its easy and you can pump images out of it in minuets. If your preping for a game and you want to have solid illustrations to wow your players with, this isn't bad.

However, its not creatively satisfying and it doesn't live up to the image in my head.

And then I found Sai.....

 

This is far far far closer to what I had in mind originally. The colors seem right, and a combo between the after affects in Paint.net and the ability to simply paint and line illustrate with Sai is a deadly combo. 

I have another harpy I will be posting soon Im sure.