Thunderscape iconic - Entomancer

This is the entomancer, another one of the iconic characters done for the upcoming Thunderscape role playing game. As you can see it changed some from the sketch to the final, as I was asked to add in a giant Bee to give more emphasis to the class abilities.

Jungle Predator

This one is from my convention exclusive Savage Age lithograph collection, and actually features the likeness of a model I worked with back in my T-shirt designing days. Here she is dressed as a Conan era amazon huntress, with a pet black panther just for fun.

Magic the Gathering: Theros - Meletis Charlatan

This was my first image for the Magic the Gathering: Theros block. The people are more Mediterranean, the monsters and architecture are more Greek, and the colors are bright and sun drenched. It was a great experience, and I loved the setting, Greek mythology was a huge inspiration for me as a kid, so combining my love of magic and mythology just worked out really well.

Scoundrels of Skullport

Last year I had the privilege to create some work for the expansion to the Lords of Waterdeep board game, Scoundrels of Skullport, and it was a lot of fun. In the base set of Lords of Waterdeep, I contributed 5 images, and gave them a rather bright, graphic look to bring them in line with modern D&D branding.

With the expansion, I knew it was featuring one of the darker cities in D&D lore, and in fact was featuring the first ever image of murder that has ever appeared in D&D (I know, I couldn't believe it either) and so I wanted to give the art for this set a darker look. A more subdued color palette, more realistic proportions and lighting, and just a grittier feel overall.

Featured here is the first of the images, featuring the above referenced scene of murder, and I will be debuting the rest of them here over the coming weeks.

Magic the Gathering art - Curse of Chaos

This was done for the special release for Magic the Gathering: Commander 2013. The art order asked to show an opulently garbed priest standing in front of a stained glass window getting bathed in crimson light and looking terrified, which proved to be an interesting challenge. I really enjoyed painting the folds of his robes and the little ornate details into his outfit.

Inner Sea NPC Codex cover

This is my second cover for Paizo publishing's Pathfinder set of books. And it nearly killed me.

When the art director asks me to draw with a certain style, I love the challenge. When she gives me the art order, and its actually referencing a previous cover in tone, and the cover is by Wayne Reynolds, I knew it was going to be a lot of fun, but a serious undertaking. And it definitely was.

 

I've done a number of pieces over the years that have included many separate characters. In fact, some of the card games I work on have commissioned me to do huge pieces with giant backgrounds and hordes of characters all fitting together to create one giant story they could cut into many different cards, which has always been a significant bit of work artistically, and a lot of time to complete.

 

But this image, it was a cover. So the real estate was limited. I couldn't spread out the characters over a wide background, and layer them in easily and simply. No, this was the kind of image I had actually never approached, the kind where characters are literally piled on top of each other, and every square inch includes some kind of small story or detail. And for the final catch, I had a little less then two weeks to complete it, which turned out to be just enough time.

And out of the 21 characters in the image (I'm counting the cat) 12 of them had reference art that needed to match exactly. Which added just a little bit more difficulty to the overall project.

 

 

 And here is the original cover by Wayne that I referenced earlier, which I was asked to use as inspiration and reference, since in some ways the cover I was creating was like a sequel to his work.

New Magic the Gathering art

This image was really interesting to create. I had to show the paladin character as the main figure, getting sucked into a fragmenting hole in time and space. I knew it would read easiest as shattering glass, which turned into a lot of fun to render actually. I probably spent way more time then I should have on all the little shards and cracks.

Hex - Emberspire Witch

Last year I did a few pieces for the new Cryptozoic card game Hex, and as they have posted the preview for the whole game online, I am now able to show the work. Here is the initial sketch, the color rough, and the final rendered image.

Thunderscape

Back in 1995, A game called Thunderscape was released for PC, and I loved it. It was a really edgy take on fantasy, with steam power and new takes on all the classic fantasy tropes. It was far from perfect, but as a lifelong fan of computer rpg's, to me it was a big step forward for the genre.

 In 2013, Kyoudai Games bought the rights to produce a new pen & paper rpg based on the license. It's a true joy, as I've mentioned many times, to work on a game from my childhood. It's an even greater pleasure to contribute to the new life of a game I loved, that has long since sat in the back of a dusty closet for 18 years. Thunderscape would be graduating from high school if it had stayed around this whole time.

And so, when the guys at Kyoudai contacted me about doing art for the game after they ran a wildly successful kickstarter, I jumped at the chance. And I'm glad I did, because they didn't just want me to do art, they wanted me to create the iconic character archetypes for the book. The main characters by which every player who picks up the book will use as a compass to shape their own contributions to the world of Aden.

For the next few weeks, I will be showing the iconic Thunderscape character art here.
Here is the first, the Mechamage.

Numenera is finally here!

I have participated in quite a few kickstarter projects at this point, both as a professional contractor, and as a backer of projects that I find intriguing or just plain exciting.
Numenera was just such a project a little while ago, and having worked with Monte years ago, I knew the quality of the game that was forthcoming, and the setting was so interesting and original, that I had to offer up some money to see it made real. Of course, I was not alone in this regard. It was a successful kickstarter, to say the least.
And a few weeks after it finished its round of kick-starting as such a resounding success, Monte shot me an e-mail asking me if I wanted to be a part of it, and of course I said yes.

Here are the sketches and final works that resulted from the initial work produced for the corebook of the setting. I am, as I write this, now working on the next several books in the line. So, more weird is likely to follow in the future!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moshi Sasako

Legend of the Five Rings is a fun game. And as an artist, its one of the better card games out there to be a part of, and one of the reasons why is that they routinely re-envision characters from set to set.

Of course, it gets complicated when the original version of a beloved character is produced by the fan favorite artist on the game. There's basically no way to hand it to another artist without the fan base being disappointed in the change, so essentially, there's no where to go but down.

I found myself in precisely this circumstance not too long ago. It just so happened that Steve Argyle, the aforementioned "fan favorite" artist, is also the art director, and a man of no small tyrannical tendencies, commissioned me to create art for a card that he had produced the original art for. I could actually hear him cackling softly to himself as I read the e-mail. This was because he included an MP3 of himself, cackling softly, and labeled it "play while reading this e-mail". So, yeah, tyrannical right?

This is a link to the original art done by Steve-o: http://www.steveargyle.com/gallery/artwork/?artwork_id=394

And here is the art I produced, much like a man giving a heroic last speech while standing in front of a firing squad awaiting his execution, I gave it my best shot while knowing full well my efforts would be futile in the end. But actually, I thought it turned out pretty cool, and hopefully the fans will find it in their hearts to love both versions, if not equally, at least close to it.

And for further information about the production of the work itself, the concept was a fairly simple one. What could possibly improve on a flying hot girl Shugenja blasting a ship in the middle of the ocean with a bolt of lightning?...
...TWO ships being blasted with lightning. BOOM. *drops microphone, exits stage*

 

Relic character art 3

This guy is a little more of a traditional archetype, a crusader or paladin style warrior, complete with multiple weapons and elaborate, heavy armor. The little ornate details are what make this kind of character fun to draw.

 

Relic Character art 2

This is another one from the Merchant kingdoms, this time a featuring a magic user from a fairly unusual character race that is unique to the setting in my experience with RPG's. She may not look any different from a human sorceress here, but lets say the differences become more distinct when you see her in color.

Relic Character art1

This was one of the character archetypes I made for Savage Mojo's Relic fantasy setting, specifically the source book centered around the merchant kingdoms, which have an Arabic flavour.

 

This was designed to be the archetype fighter, a soldier, mercenary, or guardsman.

Cardback sketches from Comic Con

 

As many of you are no doubt aware, doing art for Magic the Gathering has a few perks. Among those, are the 50 copies of the "Whiteback" comps that Wizards sends to the contributing artists of the game. Every card we create, we essentially receive 50 copies of a non playable, very limited, very small print of the image. And while I have never sold them before now, I have finally decided to break out my supply of whitebacks and start bringing them with me to conventions.

 

Seen here is a sampling (about half) of the card sketches I brought to Comic Con in San Diego this year.

 

Gozaru No Oni

This image had a wonderful description for me to work from. It was simply that it needed to be an enormous creature, and a cross between a centipede and a sandworm, but the art director made sure to mention that I could take it in a different direction if I was inspired, and that it simply needed to be as big as possible, scary, and breaking through a giant wall. The "codename" given to the creature during development was "Godzilla", which I thought was great. I spent several days designing different kinds of bodies and heads, some with alien limbs and spikes, some closer to a giant mutated serpent, and some that were more insect then wyrm. But in the end I picked the pieces that worked best, and combined everything together into the image as it looks in the submitted sketch.

Here it is after I cut out the main figure and the wall, and started with the basic shading of the overall scene, the serpent body, and was actually pretty far along with the detail work for the head. I knew it was going to be the trickiest part of the image, so I went in and tackled it first.

This is where I pulled back the contrast of the wall and darkened it down a bit. I needed it to show depth behind the monsters head, and still have smoke and debris blowing around it at the same time, So I played with the tone until it gave me what I needed. I had also begun to color the monster as well.

 

 

 Here I've added back the shading to the wall, and created crack details and further defined the flying rocks. I also added in the final colors for the creatures eyes and mouth, and added the birds in the background for additional size reference and interest in that side of the image. I initially wanted to put mountains in the background, and planned to as seen in the approved sketch, but realized half way through that it kind of ruined the upward angle shot, and almost made the creature seem smaller, so I took them out and replaced them with birds.

Here I've refined a bit more of the lighting, worked in the body details, the wall texture, and nearly finalized the overall scene color concept.

Here I've added some light coloring to the sky to help contrast the creature from the background, and added in even more texture, including an overall scene texture overlay to add more action and visual noise to the image.

Here I've flattened it down, and darkened it a bit, and really played around with the colors, glows, depth of field, and contrast. Sometimes with an image like this, a monochromatic palette can lend realism, but then adding just enough color to give it impact can be a fine line, so I usually wait until the latter stages of an image to really play with the color theory.

Spirit of the Burning Sky

This image was done for the card game "Warlord" and was actually very fast from design to completion. It took about 4 hours.

One of the reasons it was so fast to design, was that it was a new version of a monster that I had designed for the game previously, called a "Stormwraith", and the original design had been so popular, that I had been asked to do more of them in each set, until it was simply an easy subject for me to work with. The Spirit of the Burning Sky was simply the same kind of character, but using fire instead of electricity.

This first image is the sketch as submitted to the client.

 

 

 

After approval, I started rendering in the lights and shadows, cut out the main figure, and began to do a little bit of the edging details as well.

 

Here I added even more shadows, and darkened up the overall character to create a very silhouetted look. I also knew he was going to be surrounded by fire, so I started adding in the basic shapes for dark smoke behind him, to give the fire contrast and maintain depth.

 Here I added in the fire effects, and some basic color for the background.

 

And here is the final, with textures, another layer of color adjustment to darken things down a bit more and bring out the orange and reds, glow effects and some sparks to add motion and little detail.

Doombringer

 This was a fun one, a job done for a large, particularly demanding card game company that shall remain nameless.
The original description was that the monster needed to be a giant, fire based, apocalypse monster. The shape size and details were all open season. So I provided the sketches shown here, and they picked the first one, as I suspected they probably would.

 After the initial sketch approvals, I sent in progressive shots for incremental approval, something I don't usually do, but it has the added benefit of saving out piece by piece images for me to show how the image came together. This is the color sketch, using just basic shading and coloring to create a rough for the images overall concept.

Here is the rough refined a bit more, with added coloring and texture to the background, to bring the figure out more, and with some rim lighting for a little dramatic contrast. I also reduced down the contrast of the fires along his back and neck area, so I could paint in the final fire over the top.

And here it is at final, with the background colors saturated even more for contrast (with fairly low color characters this is a trick that can add more color to the image without hurting the overall character concept or mood to much) And of course with the finished fire, molten cracks, glow effects, even more rim lighting, and just a whole lot of little refined detail work.