One of the great things about the gaming community is its abundant creativity when it comes to expressing its fandom. Activision Blizzard's Diablo, with its vast array of notable characters and rich lore, certainly makes for fantastic inspiration for gifted fans. In a display of incredible talent, a YouTube content creator has put colored pencil to paper and sketched a vibrant portrait of Diablo's former Archangel of Justice, Tyrael, managing to draw the entire image freehand.
Tyrael is perhaps one of Diablo's best known characters. A stalwart angel in the battle against hell, Tyrael is considered to be law-abiding and inflexible, as the story of Diablo progresses, however, Tyrael learns to sympathize with mortals, ultimately sacrificing his angelic powers in order to aid humanity in its struggle against hell's forces. While Diablo 3's version of Tyrael is a mortal, the character is mostly renowned for his appearance in Diablo 2, his signature golden armor, massive wings, and pale hood a testament to Blizzard's impeccable character design.
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The YouTube channel, Freedraw, has posted a time-lapse that shows off an incredible portrait of Tyrael, from pencil outline to full-color artwork. Adhering to the channel's name, the entire sketch is completed freehand, with no grid or tools used for guidance during the process, making it all the more impressive. The artist appears to have followed Diablo 3's version of the character, with his more tendril-like wings and heavily detailed gilded plate armor. There is pain-staking effort by the artist to create a perfect polished finish to Tyrael's armor, with the light beautifully captured in each piece of plate, all of the work done without the assistance of any tools or guidelines.
Hailing from South Korea, Freedraw's videos mostly revolve around the sketching of famous K-pop artists, with members from Twice, BTS and Blackpink all being featured on the artist's YouTube and Instagram. The image of Tyrael seems to be part of a new series of drawings focused on video games, the artist tackling characters from other Blizzard titles, such as Illidan Stormrage from World of Warcraft and Kerrigan from StarCraft. All of the illustrations are created using colored pencil, with Freedraw managing such vivid detail with the medium that viewers would be forgiven for thinking the artworks were created digitally.
For lovers of video games, film, and K-pop, Freedraw's videos will certainly be a satisfying watch, compressing the immense amount of detail and work that goes into each colored pencil masterpiece into videos under ten minutes. Their ability to create such a wonderfully accurate pictures using only their hand not only makes the artworks feel organically produced, the free-flowing process makes for a pleasant viewing experience. It will be exciting to see what the talented Diablo community comes up with when Diablo 4 finally releases, especially with characters like Lilith already looking impressively fearsome.
Diablo 4 is in development for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.