I did not base either one on a particular real-life human, but I used a crap load of reference images for both. Mimara actually started as a drawing of a character for my own story but as I was doing it I realized it could work for her and went from there. As for Kellhus, I just used lots of random references of photos/illustrations that looked vaguely like what I had in mind.
Kellhus took much, much longer than Mimara, in part because I really wanted to nail my internal mental image for him as I had not really seen it done before as it has with other main characters. That being said both pictures sorta played to my strengths/advantage. I.E., Mimara's face is covered with the hood, shadows, and the locks of hair, while Kellhus was just mostly beard and hair lol, so that made it a lot easier, relatively speaking (plus they're both facing the "camera" so to speak, which made it easier for me personally). Regardless I am pretty proud of both pieces since they're easily the closest I've ever come to matching my own mental vision of the characters, particularly Kellhus (though I have lots of little things I'd like to adjust at some point down the road, such as the Decapitants in general I would like to have more details such as the crown of horns, teeth, eyes, skin texture, so on and so forth, additionally the also the overrall layout and symmetry of the figures relative to each other and their respective mountain range backdrops).
