Simone T Huynh

Stray Kalith Experimental Fan Poster

Project Overview

One of the hobbies I enjoy is playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D for short). I love that I get to exercise my creativity and imagination while developing relationships with friends, and it has sparked many small passion projects from me.

I take turns serving as the “Dungeon Master” or Game Master (DM or GM) in my group, and in my spare time have homebrewed (handwritten and original as opposed to reading from official scripts and sourcebooks) and planned a full campaign for my group to experience. Including developing a completely original creature race, adventurer class (job occupation), continent, and plane of existence.

This work is of several NPCs (non-player characters) my group met while playing my campaign. The group is called Stray Kalith, and they are famous professional performers who travel across the nations whom the party meets by happenstance.

Fun Facts and Lore

“Kalith” is the name of the creature race I created. They are a species of humanoids with dragon ancestry akin to dragonborn, albeit with a few key differences.

The word kalith is derived from the prefix ka (meaning dragon) and the suffix lith (meaning child) in a version of the Elvish language associated with D&D. So put together, the name means “Child of the Dragons” or literally “Dragon Child”.

The group name Stray Kalith is derived from the name of the K-pop group Stray Kids, who are the primary inspiration for these characters.

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Colour Harmony

I was greatly challenged when making this piece to choose colours for each of the characters. Each character had to have a unique primary colour to differentiate from the others, but all the colours had to look cohesive. After trying out about a dozen different colour combinations I settled on the current base colours for each of them.

My next steps focused on tying each character’s secondary and accent colours into one or two others themes so that everything harmonised together. I also intentionally chose a reference image that included outfits that already had more neutral colours- so as to not detract from the colorful characters.

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Image Credit: DayDay on X

Stylisation Challenges

Styling each character to be unique and cohesive with the shapes according to the rules of kalith genetics while also keeping the characters reminiscent of their real-life inspirations proved a challenge as well. But a much easier one to solve compared to the colour harmony issue.

Aside from colour, each character bears unique proportions and shaping of the eyes, horns, ears, frills, and scale markings. One may have slightly smaller, upturned ears, while another may have larger, longer ears that droop slightly.