Mara Bruntbearer

Every year for her birthday, I end up drawing her as something different. It's become a rather odd tradition I suppose. This year (and several months late) she's a giant squirrel-destroying muscle-mountain barbarian (instead of a bounty hunter velociraptor, naga or banana). This stems from a story on how squirrels destroyed her car. Barbarians don't have cars, that's silly! Well of course they don't have cars, with all those squirrels around.
So, in a fantasy setting, the weight of the world generally makes you stronger through your trials and experiences, until you're a hardened badass beast. In reality, we just get sorta beat down and worn out. So, ideally, Mara should be a giant hulking brute that laughs heartily at the antics of shoreline crustaceans. However, the tough little nut version we've got is good too, just has less axes and and scenic mountain overlooks.

Photoshop CS6. Tablet. Character design took elements from Simon Belmont... but with more squirrel fur. Took a more painterly approach to this one. Started out loosely with the mountains... and realized my file was too small, so enlargement happened and the mountains actually were tiled horizontally a bit with some modifications. So, that established my color tone. Did about 3 rough lineart layers for the figure, and after a lot of puppet warping to re-proportion everything and a new axe I had my lines. From there, basic colors and shading. 'Nother layer of color was added over the black lineart to give it a different look. Same procedure happened with the foreground landscape. Made a scrub brush brush to save a little time. Probably could have gone further with the lighting and highlights, but the color looked good as was, so I called it done.