How the West was Lost

This one (in 3 parts) has a painful history. Maybe someday when the trauma has worn off I'll tell the tale.

Sword and Planet

Been reading Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books. I'm so inspired! And so excited that Andrew Stanton is directing the movie.

This one is real pen & ink, not one of my digital fakeries.

Mouse Guard

Comic Con was a blast this year! This is the first time in years I've gone as a fan not as an artist hawking his wares at a table. I saw many great things, but one of my favorites was David Petersen's Mouse Guard.

I read through it on the plane ride back and it was so good I'm looking forward to more. If you like good stories and good art I highly recommend it.

Flapper quick study

It's not often I use Painter, and even less often for quick studies. But I wanted to capture some thick buttery brush strokes in this sketch.

Castle

A quick little castle painting. Tried to focus on atmosphere and lighting.

Cursed Village

This was the original sketch, done while in some boring meeting.

Bridge

Castle ruins

Free Sword

All you have to do is pull it out of the stone.

Night version.

Daidoji Chitose

Samurai are always cool. This is one I did a while back for Legend of the 5 Rings.

Barbarian, Fighter, Druid

So I did this sketch of a barbarian with my splattery custom brushes in photoshop.

Then I turned him into a fighter.

And finally, into a druid:

This is something I see a lot of concept artists do where they continually morph a character or pose into several different variations. Looking through my work I'm surprised I haven't done more of this. It's fun, and you can quickly generate a lot of drawings. I love photoshop.

Crows

I decided to go with the more realistic crows. Hopefully they still have some style to them.

Monkeys!

My wife has been working on this little project called Monkey Island, which was just announced! Her and her team were so dedicated, it was months and months of working until 2 or 3 in the morning and weekends. I'm just blown away by all the amazing work they did.

She was working so much we missed her, my daughter and I are glad to finally get her back...

http://www.lucasarts.com/games/monkeyisland/

Style vs. Stylized

I've been working on this little side project for a while and I reached a critical juncture. I love goth art style in works by Edward Gorey, some Tim Burton, and very few other things. I'm quite particular about it. I love Lenore for example, but not many other comic books in that genre.

This project has a morbid subject (murder), but it is also light hearted. In the way Edward Gorey is quite morbid, but his wit makes it so entertaining. Anyway, the juncture I am at is exactly how stylized am I going to make the art. This was my first pass (okay, more like 21st pass):


Well, my wife made some great observations, particularly about the general flavor of the project and suggested I push the crows to have a little more personality - to be a little less realistic. I agreed and took another pass. Then realized everything else had to be just as stylized - the trees, the character, so on. This was my second attempt:


I definitely like the crows better. I think the design is stronger. I can draw a better character then that and will have to just practice more to get them right. But I'm wondering if this is an improvement, or is it merely different?

Sketch monsters

A page of monsters and stuff from my sketchbook. I just finished a huge commission of 40 drawings and needed to wind down and relax a bit. Getting that 40th drawing done was like lifting the weight of the world off my back. whew!

Goliath vs. Gnoll

Establishing scale without any of the classic "scale symbols" such as a person, or doorway, or a car is hard to do. Here the main character is a "goliath". Not that you can tell it is any larger than an average person, or can you?

Ink splats

I've been playing around with creating ink splats to make Photoshop brushes a lot lately. I must have made a dozen pages worth of these:


This quick sketch was painted in Photoshop entirely using ink splat brushes:

Deva

One of the coolest things in the Player's Handbook 2 is the new character race: the deva. I was fortunate to do an illustration of one.

PHB2 - Wild Elf

The Player's Handbook 2 was recently released, which I did a few illustrations for. This one called for a Wild Elf. My first version (the bottom one) wasn't quite "wild" enough, so I added some tattoos and animal pelts - because everyone knows that makes you wilder.

Brigand

When I was recently making a portfolio, I dug up this old image. I fixed a few things (his head was too big - proportions have always been hard for me) and thought it'd make a good blog post.