New portfolio page

I've decided to add a new page to my site to bring focus on some of my more stylized work. I was dissatisfied when I was meeting clients whom I was interested in working with but not having examples that show more colorful less gritty work. I look forward to populating it with more illustrative stuff in the future as well. I'm also renaming "Illustration" to "Fantasy" as part of this new addition.

D&D 5e Genghis Con module map

I'm going to be a volunteer DM at this weekend's Genghis Con. The convention isn't large enough for an official package from Wizards so we're running a homebrew module. The fact that its roughly 12-hours of content has been interesting to deal with, but hopefully we'll have a few hours in there to highlight local game-mastering.

Handouts are always popular and I volunteered to create a map that will list out the various number of challenges that the players will have an option to go at. Really wish I could be doing this for a larger audience but each of these mini-projects is a step closer I think.

The map itself was a lot of fun to do, I've been messing around with wax-stamps recently and thought I'd try to integrate them into this project. Rather than a more illustrative map I wanted to try to sell the physicality of a handout. Even though this is a two-dimensional printout I wanted to treat it very sculptural, the wax stamps are painted to pop-off and the foil elements are lit to contrast materials on the map. The gold wax/brushed leaf in the wax stamps was a great accidental discovery I made while trying to get the stamp-drawings to pop. I love that even while working in photoshop I can still find happy accidents that really sell an idea that I have.

It'll be a very very very long weekend but looking forward to it. Its exciting to present material you've written to players and capture their impressions of it. I'll probably make a post afterwards to talk about what I actually designed for the convention and how it was received, it'll be fun to make a design-focused post since its something I'm really wanting to bring to the fore along with my art.

New year new art!

Through most of my artistic journey, I've found I respond well to certain styles and motifs, as any artist does. But nothing has quite hit all my buttons as Dragon Age Inquisition's character tarot cards. They are messy, elegant, graphic, and full of arcane designs and icons. They are gorgeous. I don't usually do fan-art, but I was just so gobsmacked by it all that I've done a kind of fan-style piece.

If you haven't enjoyed the latest Dragon Age addition, here's a link to an imgur album with a decent collection of the images: http://imgur.com/a/nZQqC

I believe the artists responsible for the cards were: Matt Rhodes, Nick Thornborrow, Casper Konefal and Ramil Sunga. This seems a partial list but that's as far as my research has found.

In any case, here's my piece, about 10 hours over the course of three days I think?

As it is with most of my work, the impetus was a tabletop game that I've been setting up to play in. The DM asked the group of us players to google up some character art to use as tokens on roll20. I decided to use this opportunity to make my own character art of course. 

The iconography is pretty simplistic, he's a character very proud of his strength, there's elements calling out his weapon of choice and that he is a horse-rider. Specifically he is part of the Hellriders of the Forgotten Realms setting. 

I feel like I have to apologize for the gratuitous naked torso. I always make the mistake of shaping out the muscle forms with the intent to put armor over it all. But then I'm just so pleased with myself over an expertly painting torso that I can't make myself paint in some armor. I mean, the character is very proud of his body and its part of his characterization. Hm--yes, its all done in the name of characterization. 

Nov 1 Self Portrait

Posted here a day late but I was on time with facebook! Hour with mirror.

Ars Magica Maps

I was working on a fairly large series of maps for our Ars Magica game but my interest has waned a bit in finishing all the maps. Part of it is simply the nature of of trying to illustrate something meant to evolve over the years. Of the four floors, I've done the base and second floor.

The first floor is a stone foundation in order to hold up the floors on top. The grounds are a mostly bare and scratched stone because the covenant is located in the center of a crater which hasn't had enough time to recover a top-soil. The magi discussed performing magic to accelerate the process but the decision ultimately came to putting their farmlands out past the rim of the crater. Easier but more vulnerable to supply disruption.

The large dark hole in the covenant is why the building was located here, the crater's meteor proceeded to sink into the soft rock, creating a kind of sinkhole leading into a labyrinth of natural honeycomb-structured caves. As of yet the magi haven't done any spelunking to investigate the meteor, but the meteor represents a sizeable source of the area's magical aura.

You'll also notice that most of the base floor is filled with a very barracks-like setup. These rooms are for the servants and laborers of the covenant and the space is actually mostly occupied. A cellar with stairs up to the kitchens is one of two ways to and from the second floor. The main stairway at the bottom actually proceeds directly to the second floor.

The second floor represents much of the day to day of the mundane people who live at the covenant. This floor isn't finished artistically, but it holds the kitchens, dining room, mess hall, infirmary, and the various workshops that the craftsmen used to supply the covenant with tools and things. I'm also just now realizing I never got around in drawing in the stairs to lead to the third floor but I guess I would've done that in conjunction with laying out the third floor anyway.

Maybe at a later date I'll hit a nugget of inspiration and decide to finish the manor. Even if only to post it here for all the accolades.

RPG Forum Series

As often happens, my personal work tends to be for games that I'm taking part of. These series of quick scenes were for a forum game I'm running of Ars Magica, a beautiful little game with a very intense ruleset. I had set up multiple forum threads to serve as "locations" on the magi's property and have these little illustrations to spur the roleplaying. I originally was wanting to keep them grayscale but at the very end I just couldn't avoid throwing on a quick gradient map for a bit of pop.

I apologize for the png-sized files but I had done them with a kind of stylized transparency to make it a bit more organic and help the images sort of seep through the forum page.

Council Chamber

Courtyard

Laboratory

Contrasting client work

Its always funny to me when I get hired by clients side by side and I deliver work that stylistically are very different. I take pride in my flexibility, though sometimes that bites me in the butt when I don't have a portfolio with a consistent style.

These two images were done for two different clients but its fun to be able to mess around with different mindsets when approaching an illustration. Experimenting with texture and color in a more overt way in one and focusing on form and working from photographic reference in the other.

 Of course, its even more fun when you get the chance to experiment with styles in the same project. These two images were done of the same character. The one on the left was concept art for the project while the right was a tongue-in-cheek version done for the project's kickstarter.