Dis Sketches

I seem to get a lot of comments regarding my female dwarves looking mannish, so let's preface the description with this quote from The War of the Jewels:

Some sketches of Dís again. A bit of an ongoing project and a flight of fancy - still figuring some things out that would strike a balance between "too masculine" and "masculine enough to somewhat fit Tolkien's description of female dwarves". I've thinned out her eyebrows to bring some semblance of femininity back into the design, but I'm keeping her chest and hips small with larger feet and more defined musculature. I do love drawing her insanely chunky braids, and I feel like these are still not coming out chunky enough. The rest of her isn't hirsute enough, probably. However, I just don't like how body hair comes out in pencil drawings - if I draw out every hair, the sketch gets dizzyingly complicated, if I opt for shading the hairy area, it looks weird unless it's a denser patch like her pubic area, and doing hatch marks across calves and forearms is about my least favourite way of representing limb hair ever. Once I figure out how I want to draw it, maybe you'll see hobbits. XD

Threw in some Kadír for good measure - with his soft temperament I read him as being much smaller than Dís for some reason. Yet I draw him as fairly tall in Oasis comics? Maybe Dís is just insanely tall and towers over most dwarves, and even Thorin, her brother? Maybe Nulmiril is a runt?

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