Dance of Land and Sea

As usual, this merits some explanation.

I've decided that bellydance is going to be a central part of the way my water elves (in those books I mention sometimes) worship their goddess, because I want to work bellydance into my stories. So in the upper right is Mariatu, one of the main characters of the first book and High Priestess of the water elves, looking how she looks in the second book.

I also have to find ways to bridge the second book to the first book, as my original plans for the fates of some characters have changed. As such, I have also decided that Arella, princess and heir of the Sereptan Gnomes, becomes interested in bellydance and convinces Mariatu to teach her, despite the fact that she doesn't worship the elven water goddess.

This is going to put a whole new religiousy spin on book 2, but I kinda like it.

Anyway, that's the thinking of where this came from. I'm pretty pleased with it, but there's some areas that still look "grungy" because there was some smudging of the original pencil sketch while it was still in my sketchbook (I think the humidity is fucking with the graphite, or something). I tried to erase all of it, but some of it wouldn't come off. Grrr. Other than that this was fun. I imagine they're doing a kind of dance, for ritual, which depicts the meeting of land and sea. And thus the title

EDIT: I forgot to mention - I don't know if any of you remember, but Arella's eyes were originally bright blue. I've decided instead that now all Gnomes have grey eyes, to mirror the rock they can manipulate. Its dumb, but yeah.