2015 Original Art

Deep into con prep these days, so this is gonna be short. Trying to fill my originals portfolio back up, and am producing a fair amount of sketches to do so. I expect that I'll be going back in to ink, and possibly color, at least a few of these, but you can see them now, in their raw form.

Calgary Expo Incoming!

It's time once more to ramp up for the Calgary Expo. I've got a lot on my plate at the moment, and not nearly as much time as I'm used to, but I'm still really excited to see what I can put together. The work I've done for the board game (more updates coming) is not only giving me a chance to explore some conceptually different characters, but is also inspiring me to spend more time painting, and to take more risks with those paintings. It's made me significantly more confident, and most importantly, it's made me faster. I can just pop out a quick design in a few hours now, where it used to take a day, or more depending on complexity.

Looking at my Expo folder, I've got a bunch of cool pieces in process, a few of which look like they'll be done and ready in time.

Have a looksee at what I've got going on and feel free to let me know which ones you would most like to see finished.

Character Development

Just a quick update on the game today. We're about to sit down for a long day of playtesting, so I should have a couple photos of the newest version to show next week.

For now I'll stick with some art. For the most part these pieces were done up as sketches or experiments, and then in the last month or so I've polished them up a bit. We've found that having a layer of color, narrative, and of course art for the characters really brings the game to life. With that in mind I've been making a point of finding quick/easy/cheap ways to prototype different systems while still making them visually appealing. It's pushed me to become a much faster painter and designer.

Here's a look at some of the old character designs, and their current (WIP) versions. Enjoy!

Feudal Legacy

On top of designing a board game, I've been contracted to do the visual design and illustration for a Pen & Paper RPG called Feudal Legacy.

Right off the bat I needed to come up with a fresh look for some very old concepts. Elves, Dwarves, etc. After some exploration, and a lot of emails back and forth with the game designer I landed on some pretty solid designs (and found a way to update a style that I loved as a teenager).

First up was Elves. I did some preliminary sketches and then put this together.

After I received approval on the design (and got home from vacation, because one can only do some much work while on vacation) I moved into CSP (Manga Studio for most) and did up the line art.

I knew I was aiming for a finished product that looked like a mix of pencil and ink, but I wasn't sure of the specific process to use, so I tried a few things...

Pencils, Markers, Ink Wash, Digital Tone

In the end we decided on a relatively painless process. I printed the line art on letter paper, shaded it with pencil, and then scanned it back in for a little attention from Photoshop's dodge tool.

Once I had a process nailed down I started building out examples of male and female citizens for each of the six races. Come back next week and I'll show you how that went.

I've Been Busy... No Really!

A good friend and I have been working on a board game in our limited free time, and I thought I'd share a bit of behind the scenes stuff. This game is a big part of why I haven't been around blogland ... sine July. Okay, it could also be the baby has taken up significantly more of my attention than I previously thought. In the end I decided it was better to make work than show work, and so what little time I get to myself goes to sketches for cons and working on game design stuff.

I'll resist the urge to dump everything I can think of in one post in the hopes that it will make it easier for me to come back in a few days with more.

First up, a photo from a playtest in December.

 And here are some of the first character portraits that I put together (feels like ages ago). Dan and I will be returning to character design in the near future, so I expect these will change quite a bit going forward.

Look forward to showing you more in the near future! There's a lot to catch up on...