Important

I haven’t posted too much in the way of humans on here for a couple of reasons, and to be frank I don’t intend to change that much, but the main one was because I didn’t like how the humans I drew looked. They’d come out in a weird style that was distinctly not my usual, and as such the clash of style made them stick out horrendously and I hated it. This piece gives me a lot of satisfaction, I made a ton of progress in it and it’s earned it’s place in my gallery. If you don’t recognize this person, she’s from the Netflix show the Dragon Prince, which I would definitely recommend trying out. I’ll be talking about the show some in the below paragraph, so don’t go there unless you want spoilers, be warned! 

I love General Amaya so much, she is written wonderfully. As an ASL student, when I saw her signing, I was floored. A lot of little things about her would go unnoticed by a large amount of people who know nothing about Deaf culture, but there are so many small details that show the writers spent a lot of time actually researching the Deaf to make her fleshed out and an amazing individual in an under-represented community of people. There are a lot of little things she does that would be so easy to overlook, like how blunt and straightforward she is (it’s a cultural thing, most deafies won’t beat around the bush), the way she demands you to look at her when she speaks, even her choice of a shield (it leaves a hand free, so she can still talk!) is so well thought out, I love it. 

At the same time, “Deaf” isn’t her core aspect, she’s a full person. She’s funny, savvy, perceptive, it makes sense how she climbed her way up to such an important position, safeguarding the border. She does things in her own way, using her unique skills and traits to her advantage, like at the secret outpost- if she didn’t use ASL, her soldier couldn’t have have silently told her danger as quickly and effectively as he did, and the elves efforts to be silent were completely wasted, since she doesn’t use sound anyways. I was pretty surprised myself when I realized that the character I wanted to draw most from a series with dragons, beautifully intelligent, powerful dragons, was a human, but she’s too good of a character for me not to apparently:) Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk about a few of the reasons I love her so much, haha!

Art belongs to me, Amaya belongs to Netflix.