New Character Art: Khurshel

I'm feeling pretty frustrated by the work I'm doing for SOE. I'm just struggling to find my mindset when doing some of the images; I can't find that one element in the image to drive me to finish it. I'm working with my main stay of finding repetitions of light and dark but I'm having a hard time finding suitable references for what I want to do.

Anyway, today, after a few hours of messing up one of the illustrations I decided to take a break and do an illustration for Khurshel, a D&D character I play. He's a beguiler/wizard/ultimate magus Illumian, but that's not he craziest thing about him! During character creation, the DM decides each character's magic items and he decided to give my character "The Suit". The suit is a magical tuxedo with a matching stovepipe hat...

Its very different from how I usually visualize my characters, but I ran with it (pictured right w/my bat familiar, Esma!). I'm very happy with the result... although... you could probably find the model reference by googling "tuxedo" within the first few pages. :S

The Great Game is a forum event that I plan on running late 2008, or whenever GamingWorld 6 launches, whichever comes later. The game rules are fairly complex, but the main point that I'd stress in this post is that its a lot of opportunities to draw for me. Every other week, each day, I create a small illustration for The Great Game. More information will follow, but the game is something of an RPG/Risk Board Game. Anyway, I plan on setting up a website so its easier to disperse instructions. For that I've done the following works, representing the twin goddesses that work to split up the players among two forces. Red White (bottom) represents uncontrolled creation and passion while Lady Black represents negation and control through a negative process. Lady Black represents negative creation, in certain types of sculpture, such as marble carving, you create by removing material. Her powers and philosophy is centered around less is more; color is light bands negated.

Sony and Personal Work

Oops, haven't been keeping track of the blog as much as I probably should. Well, I signed the contract with SOE so I won't be able to show any of the images I'm working on until the card set has been released, which I don't know when that will be. However, it doesn't stop me from posting personal work!

This was a character portrait done for my face to face D&D DM's wife's character. A level 7 ranger with a snake motif. I kinda feel like I need to make the snake at the bottom more obvious and larger but I dunno, maybe I'll keep her pet out of the way. I enjoyed practicing armor in the picture, though I'm wondering if it was a big deteriment not having any kind of armor reference photo. I'm not that pleased with the sleeves, they are really brushy and don't really feel like any particular type of fabric. I'll probably do some more experimenting to try to get different types of cloth.