There's a longish story here.

I'm still doing art more for emotional survival these days.

A while back, I discovered the blog for one of WotC's art editors. Among other things he runs these neat little concept art contests, which I'm too chicken to enter - these contests always attract much, much better artists than me. The contests are always really good thought exercises that plug into how D&D 4e is set up.

One of the contests was designing easily recognizable silhouettes that represent the four player character roles in new-style D&D (striker, leader, controller, defender). I thumbnailed several different types of character silhouette, and wound up working up the "fey" batch of concepts.

The little guys at the bottom are recognizably "buckawn" from old D&D - but the other three are my design. I like the idea that the fey wouldn't look entirely human, and giving them deer-inspired features seemed to go with their forest-loving natures. And yes, the guy at the top is a deer-human-wolf sort of figure.