The Heart of Chateau Ripto

"At last, you foolish dragon, we meet on my turf where I cannot be defeated!"
Cue boss music
----

There was no fanart at all of Chateau Ripto (or really of ANY level of Spyro: Attack of the Rhynocs) in all of DA, so I decided to remedy that. Spyro: Attack of the Rhynocs/Spyro: Adventure feels like one of those games in a series where it wasn't a bad game per say, but it still gets forgotten incredibly frequently. I think there's more fanart of Enter the Dragonfly and the fandom pretty much abhors that game.

Which sucks because I feel that even if Attack of the Rhynocs didn't really develop him in terms of personality (Ripto's pretty much a "Rargh, dragons! Rargh, world domination!" kind of a guy and that hasn't changed in any of the games), I felt that it was a really big step up for him to suddenly be the ruler of a kingdom and have a castle. That means he can succeed and does have influence. The threat is bigger because he has an army now and a race that obeys him. The other games feel more like he's just some douche vagabond with two dinosaurs that finds himself in some magical realm and starts messing stuff up for the giggles. To see Ripto actually on a throne really adds to his menace factor, as opposed to you entering some fiery arena and he's just randomly killing sheep.

Plus Chateau Ripto had such awesome music. Evil harpsichords for the win.

Had my computer not broken, you would've seen this about nine days ago and it would've been my entry for the contest. Unfortunately, crap happens, so this didn't meet the deadline, this doesn't count as an entry, and it's now just some Ripto fanart I drew instead of in the competition. That just means that I'll learn from this mistake and prevent this from happening again, but I'd be lying if I said that this didn't make me mad. I wanted a chance at those plushies. =C

Either way, I'm happy that I drew and colored this. Can you believe that I haven’t drawn this character in SIX YEARS? Good god.
And before anyone asks, I have long deleted my old Ripto fanart off of the Internet. It was that bad.

Spyro: Attack of the Rhynocs had my favorite of Ripto boss battles, if only because the setting was NOT “circular rocky/metal arena surrounded in lava/bottomless pits” like all the Spyro boss battles seem to end up taking place in. Even the Sorceress did this. A Hero's Tail freaking did this. Enter the Dragonfly did it. What's with the big circular arenas surrounded by pits? Sadly, he doesn't actually use any magic but instead throws around large bombs all over the place while levitating on some rocks the entire boss battle, but at least the setting did its job. Spyro the Dragon has some of the best videogame settings.

This was mostly coloring practice. I'm really trying to make the colors more unified in my work. This PROBABLY came out reading as a big mess, but I'm happy to have had something to mess with. I probably overcolored the darn thing, but regardless, it was great to have some practice.

And I know technically those black bars make no sense since the picture isn't even close to widescreen, but for some reason they really added something to the picture.



-----

And for some bonus fun, here's the last time I drew a Spyro fanart with a background. Holy mother of bad color choices...