From start to finish

I thought I'd document the creation of a finished piece that I blogged about previously. It wound up being an excellent example of how happy accidents can conspire to make art better. (WARNING: Photoshop jargon ahead)

So after the last post, I attempted to clean up the lineart for the robot and insert him into the drawing. But I was very unhappy with how it was turning out. I decided that the old design of the robot was just to simple to mesh well with the intricacy of the rest of the piece. So I went back to the drawing board, re-designed the robot, and then put him into the drawing. And lo! It worked! Adding the myself and the margarita glass was quite easy after that.

So, the finished lineart of the piece:

I knew that I wanted the piece to be colored, but that I wanted something that was deliberately non-realistic. I had a vague notion that I wanted to do flat colors with a washed out color palette, so I started coloring. Several hours later, I had this:

It was a good start, but the coloring didn't look quite finished. It looked too much like a coloring book, and didn't convey the dream-like quality that I was aiming for. I wanted to add some grungy textures underneath the color layer on a low opacity, to try to give it a foggy feel.

So I dug up some textures (parchment, rust, and daguerreotype) and set out to make a texture layer. My goal was to create the texture layer UNDER the color layer at a low opacity, then set the color layer over it to multiply so that the texture would be seen faintly through the color layer. But instead, I wound up moving the texture layer OVER the color layer and wound up with this:

This was awesome! I knew right away that this was closer to what I had been looking for. It captured very well the feeling of unreality that I wanted to convey. But I thought it might have been closer to black and white movie than to "dream-like". And I'll admit that after all that time spent painstakingly coloring in the color layer, I didn't want to just toss it out the window. So I set the color layer over the textures at 50% opacity with the blending set to overlay, which resulted in this:

Now I was stuck. Both the colored and non-colored versions were awesome! After a while, I came to the conclusion that the colored version was closer to what I had wanted. So I decided to make one last change and call it done; I had wanted the robot to be holding a light-pole, but it just looked like a metal bar of some sort. So I added a lamp, tweaked the blending a little bit to make sure there wasn't anything it was missing, and then saved this version:

This turned out to be so successful that I decided I definitely want to make a series of it. And since my dreams are so bizarre, if I start recording my dreams again I will have no shortage of material!

It's going to be tough deciding which of my dreams to illustrate next. I've had a list of dreams that I've wanted to do this for for a long time. We'll see what happens when I start doing sketches for the next one.

New art in progress

So I've been working seriously on the margarita robot image that I mentioned in a previous post. I just thought I'd post a few screens of work in progress.

Here's the finished lineart for the background:



I started to sketch in the robot here:


It took a few tries to get the positioning right, but I think it will look good once it's polished.

More later!

Another Kagematsu update

This is more for Danielle's benefit than anyone else, but so far I'm very excited about the progress of the second Kagematsu image.

Thankfully the last image in the series will be much less complex... The scales alone have been a nightmare.

EDIT: Had trouble sleeping, so I did another hour's work and finished up the dragon. Maybe another hour left to put in an appropriate background, but for now I'm going back to bed.

Kagematsu versus the dragon - in progress

OMG. This is going to be so awesome it hurts.

I will for sure post in-progress updates of this one. It's going to be really lovely.

More Kagematsu

First off, I was negligent in not linking to an excellent Playtesting thread that Ron Edwards wrote up on the Forge after our game at last year's GenCon. Though the game has gone through revisions since then, I think that you can still get a good feel for what sort of play the game creates. If you're interested, you can read it here.

Secondly, the sketch that I posted yesterday has since undergone some revisions. You can see the new version here:

And here is the other image that I promised, the one that is already finished and ready to go. It took a lot of trial and error to get right, but I'm soooo happy with how it turned out and plan on offering prints of these images at GenCon.

Artwork for Kagematsu

Last year at GenCon, I got an opportunity to play Danielle Lewon's game Kagematsu which was all kinds of fun. It was still in late playtesting last year, and this year she's finally releasing it. It's a super fantastic game, and I was very excited when I got the chance to illustrate this game. (If you haven't heard of this game, go follow that link and read about it. It's awesome, trust me.)

I'm on a bit of a tight schedule to accomodate getting the book printed in time for GenCon, but it's well worth it. I've already had quite a bit of fun working on the pieces for this game.

I've gotten the first one finished already, which I'll hold off on posting for right now. I'm working on the second, which is a fight between Kagematsu, the samurai from whom the game takes its name, and a dragon - one of the many potential threats that the women in the game are trying to get Kagematsu to protect them from.

Here's a sketch to whet your appetite:

I started this sketch off in pencil and finished it up digitally since the dragon was giving me some trouble. I'm super excited to see what the finished version of this piece will look like. Danielle has me doing her pieces in a sort of modified ukiyo-e style, which has been a lot of fun and a good challenge...

It's getting late, so I'll post about Pirate Jenny tomorrow...

I'm not dead...

Black Sky is occupying rather a lot of my attention. I've finished drafting v1.1 and need to break it again so I can move on to v1.2. I'm very happy because this looks like a game I can actually finish, unlike Delta Choir.

Anyway. I've determined that I WILL finish the cover for Showdown in the next week. Here's a small snippet of where I'm at:

As I mentioned to Seth in my email, the trick will be making him read as "pirate" and not "redcoat" (a lot of it is in the hat). Still, having fun with this one!

Showdown cover - work in progress

Not too long ago I started coloring the cover of Showdown, got something I really liked, and then screwed up the file. I couldn't bring myself to work on it right away again, but tonight I fired up my computer and got about a third of the way through coloring the cover.

I thought I'd post some images of the work in progress, just to give a sense of the progression.

I'm very excited. This is going to be quite awesome.

EDIT: I worked on it a bit more, so I decided to add one more image:

Another quick Trollbabe update

So I finished another Trollbabe piece and work proceeds apace on the last two. Here's the one I finished:

CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW

I've nearly finished number four - it's about 75% complete. I've still got the rest of the troll to finish (obviously) and some finer gradation of shading to do in some parts, but this one is going pretty quickly.

We're not playing Hero's Banner again until next week, but I'm sure I'll have art then.

Trollbabe, part 3927

Things have been pretty busy in the last little while. Tae Kwon Do has been eating up a fair amount of my time. The investment has been worth it; after three months I have my green belt again. I'm hoping I can get my black belt back inside of two years. It's a worthy goal, but losing two to three nights a week is tough for art production.

Also, my shows are back on the air. True Blood has joined Heroes and Supernatural in the list of shows allowed to suck out my brain meats. I'm quite enjoying all three of them right now.

Lastly, I've been working on writing the alpha draft of the game that is not the angel game. It's a bit frustrating, because I know what I want the game to do. I'm just having trouble translating my notes into speech intelligible to humans that aren't me. But things proceed apace with that as well. I'm up to 2400 words, which is probably about a quarter to a third finished. Assuming I keep plugging away at it I'll have it finished and in a state to look at before too terribly long. Until then, I don't plan on talking about it.

Anyhow, all of this means I need to be a bit more proactive in finding bits of time to cram in Trollbabe shading. The more I do, the quicker I get - which helps.

Trollbabe piece number three is shaping up well. I finished the lineart, which you can see here:

CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW

I spent forty-five minutes doing the shading and managed to do a creditable job on the face - which is always the fiddliest bit to do. So far I'm quite happy with how this one is turning out.

This image pretty much convinced me that I'll need to do color versions of these Trollbabes once I've finished up the black and white ones for Ron. Gaming needs more pinups of fully clothed fantasy women kicking ass.

Thou Art But A Warrior illustration, continued

I've been continuing to work on the illustration that I started for Thou Art But A Warrior. Since I did the drawing, I discovered that the boring armor I had drawn was about 150 years out of date. Hooray! Which means I get to do something much more awesome. It doesn't look awesome now, but it will.

Getting the skin tones right is something I have been really self conscious about. I played around lightening and darkening out of paranoia about not having euro-centric illustrations. The last thing I want to do is white-ify people.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that there's no way to know what skin tone the native Spanish people had before interbreeding for several centuries with Moors and Arabs and just sampled photographs of modern Spaniards. It's a compromise, sure, but it's the best I can do.

I'm loving coloring this, because I get to go crazy with rich colors. And I'm going to add awesome patterns. Woot.

CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION

I'll continue to update as I make progress. I've got a lot of other stuff on the go, so work on this is going to be pretty sporadic. And I'm holding off on other illustrations so that I can pirate material from what my playtesters come up with.