I liked the idea of doing a Kor.... here's a icebreaker to get Ruwyn's gooses flowing!

Looks really good, except that Kor have face tentacles.

Jinsen does not have them, actually! In fact, that Kor of his plane lack them altogether. Instead, they tend to be taller, more powerfully built, and have black eyes instead of white ones! Why this is, anyone could guess, but the male Kor do, in fact, lack the facial tentacles.

Which means I love this picture! it's very well done. I will admit, the colors strike me as a little odd, but really, you've got Jinsen down very well here! I wish there was something to scale him with - it's sort of hard to gauge his size, but man do I love that pose. The clothing is also excellent and definitely an accurate approximation of what he wears.

Thanks for posting!

So the Kor there look identical to humans? Or identical to Elves? How can anyone tell the difference?

Aside from looking 100% human I like his face.

The way his shirt falls makes it look like he has boobs on his ?back? though.

As far as I can tell

• Alabaster white skin
• Solid-black eyes
• Different Silhouette
• Possibly lack of body/facial hair? Jinsen is mentioned as being bald and clean-shaven, but it's not mentioned how much of that is racial.

He also has pointy ears! Much like other Kor. Jinsen shaves his head and face, so the Kor of his plane do grow hair. Generally speaking, it's white and tends to only be recognizable when it's long. The older a Kor gets, the dark their hair gets, so an elderly Kor will have hair more the color of gray or silver.

And again, the Kor of Jinsen's plane are taller, and less prone to excess fat. (This is mostly because of they're nomadic lifestyle, but they never really stay in any one place when it gets to cold, so they never developed the need for fat stores) So lithe, solid, tall, white skin, pointy ears, solid black eyes...

I mean, at most you'd mistake a Kor for a particularly tall human, and at a distance. Female Kor in Zendikar were already pretty much just white-skinned, white-eyed elves. The main difference in appearance were the piercings and clothing. (Elves had tattoos on Zendikar too. Or at least face paint.)

Kor are humanoid. Shrug. If they were supposed to look drastically different from humans, they would have been designed that way. I was just working with what I was given.

Only the Joraga, and to a smaller degree the Mul Daya, but neither the Kazandu nor the Tajuru did.

It's not the clearest thing, particularly on Zendikar, but they have a different skull shape. The original Rathi core also had different facial features, with some features appearing almost cat-like.
The actual skull is elongated towards the back while the jaw juts forward to a larger degree. It's more triangular than the rectangular human comparison.

Here's a bit better....

I can't speak for Ruwin's Kor, but it IS closer. In comparison with traditional kor, you have the head too vertical past the eyebrows. It actually is somewhat shaped like a cat's skull, with a lot of horizontal growth.

I wish I could scan the Rathi style guide I have, because it has some great anatomy notes, but I can't without effectively destroying the book.

Out of both pieces, I have to say that the actual sword bothers me a lot because... that isn't a katana. The fact that the blade sweeps into some sort of handguard means that no matter anything else about it, it isn't a katana.

here's more like....? and fixed the sword....

Yeah, that's a LOOOOOT more in line with the kor. It does a good job of establishing his more non-human features.
As a side note, and this doesn't really relate to Jinsen or the zendikar kor, but the Rathi kor were fairly mutated by their stay on Rath, so it is interesting to put them side by side with later iterations of kor.

Kor in card art haven't had the most uniform look, especially in Tempest block but even in Zendikar. From the front, the bridges of their noses range from wider than a human's to very narrow.

In Rath art they vary enough that I wonder how much style guide the artists got.

Rathi Kor look like they have sloping foreheads, but the Zendikari Kor have cylindrical-looking heads to me. Except Kor Outfitter. (You can probably tell I preferred the Rathi look, which I was used to.)

Rathi Kor were occasionally blue or even purple, too. (I don't know about that purple dude, though. Looks like an error what with the brown beard...)

The funny thing is that despite the face tentacles clearly not being hair, originally they weren't typed as a separate race from humans. It's like Wizards briefly toyed with letting humans have the same degree of racial diversity (or mutation) as goblins and merfolk, and then changed their minds. But then made the next version of Kor more human-looking while giving them a separate species name.

I think of Kor as being more closely related to humans than elves.

I think you've been doing a lot of wiki work lately, Arcades.

I... no I haven't. Huh?

About Jinsen's eyes, they're normally all-black, right? In the first picture are they glowing while he uses his magic?

lol here's my last version.... his skin tone is "grayscale" against a sepia monotone...

Okay, so i got tired of my last attempt once i realized he looks like nasfuratu...hehe

Does this guy have bushido?

He's a planeswalker, and while he visits Kamigawa often, he's not from there, so I don't think he has Bushido.

But yeah, this looks pretty good! His neck seems a little think when compared to the width of his shoulders, but hey, I think this is your best one so far! I'm really digging the cheekbones. Thanks for posting!

Here's in color...

They're looking great Lunar Mystic.