Cailin Cleigh comes from a long line of animators - artisans who construct golems and bring them to life. Unfortunately, none of the golems she makes will move on their own, so she fails to make a career of this and instead finds herself working in the mines. After almost dying on the job several times, her father urges her to pursue something safer, so she takes him up on that suggestion and becomes a bounty hunter.

Her weapon of choice, Zweihander, is a set of two handed-swords which are actually just golem arms that were accidentally flattened during steaming. Those things are expensive to make, so Cailin salvaged them and worked them into swords. Even though she can't bring them to life, she has sufficient proficiency in hand-puppeteering to manipulate them like extensions of her arms. Her fighting style relies a lot on using her swords to grab and disarm her opponent when they attempt to parry her strikes.

Her current opponent, Strawjack, is a renegade scarecrow that took crop protection a little too seriously and ended up running off with all the produce before the farmers could harvest them. He stockpiles them in the unfillable hole in his heart and brings them back out from his head (an ability called "Face Plant"). Also, he's a shameless flirt who preys on fresh fruits & vegetables.

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This time I made only the line art and flat colors in Flash, and then did everything else in Manga Studio. I finally learned to make use of selections by using the magic wand tool on the flats, and so was able to do all the character lighting on two layers. I tried for sharper shadows than I usually do in digital painting, and I think I like it! I believe I've made a mistake in the past where I felt that I had to shade smoothly when not in Flash (since it's hard to make soft shadows there), but I feel like the harder, flatter shading produces a stronger visual impact. I also had fun with the background - I find nature to be more fun to paint than buildings since it's a lot more forgiving in regards to shapes and perspective. You can easily tell when two boxes don't line up, but if a tree is crooked...that's OK.

Oh yeah, and yes, Cailin does have a clock as her belt buckle because I didn't know what to do for its design and ended up just basing it off of a wrist watch. Because giant hands.

Made in Manga Studio & Flash