Tuesday 25 June 2013

Heroes of Hellas

I was sat on a bus in 'The Yorkshire' and I thought I'd do something productive so I found one of my old Hellas linework illustrations and thought I'd colour it.

I had to tidy up the linework a bit first though. An HOUR AND A HALF LATER I was finished tidying. Man, my linework has really tightened up since I went all digital. I also saw at least a dozen errors which I wouldn't have let slide now but I left them all in otherwise I might as well have redrawn the whole thing which would have defeated the purpose of the exercise.

Anyway, it was nice to revist an older piece just to see how much I have moved on. Sometimes it feels as if you haven't gotten anywhere until you really go back and pull apart your old stuff to see for yourself.

It was also nice to revisit this piece. A lot of these Hellas pics are very close to my heart: I redrew and redrew them trying to get the poses just right. This amazon girl was always a favourite- I really like how her face and pose turned out. The costume, armour and weapons are all exhaustingly researched for precision as was my practice on all of the Hellas stuff. Being an anthropologist myself and having an archaeologist brother (we all know archaeology is just a branch of anthropology ;) ) I find it invaluable to dig into and pull apart the cultural reference so I can base my work on it. Even the grandiose full-on fantasy pieces have a foundation of acurate historical artifacts. I find adding this sort of thing adds believability to the unbelievable.

Saturday 1 June 2013

Triumphant!

Here is another character which I designed for the print edition of the fantastic Triumphant! RPG frpm Beyond Belief Games which is now available on lulu.
Very pleased with the colours on this one.
She's called Star and I envisaged her as a companion for the Captain Superior of the 80s who has gone on to become a hero in her own right.
She has golden cestus which are my take on Wonder Woman's bracelets and lasso.
Also, she's blonde. I don't draw blondes very often, but I felt it suited the character and design in this case. And it helped to differentiate her from Diana/Donna Troy a bit.

Carpathia RPG

Here is the vampire hunter character from Carpathia.
He is actually the first one I designed and helped to cement a lot of style choices which will remain consistent in the art throughout the project.
He was going to be someone completely different but for some reason this guy insisted on being drawn instead. I know not why, but I couldn't say no to him.

Carpathia RPG

Slowly trying to chip away at doing the artwork for the Hammer Horror Rpg which I'm helping to make in asociation with Evil DM Productions.
We're using the Barbarians of Lemuria system, with all of the fantastic pulp upgrades as found in Dicey Tales.
Lot of work, but it's going to be awesome.
Here is one of the example characters from it.
Lots of layers involved so she took a while.
She showcases a lot of the Carpathia colour palette in her blacks, reds, browns and creams.
All done on my phone as always.
(I had a Megan Fox obsession to work off so I was drawing her from a still from Jonah Hex, which eventually morphed into this. The pose is the same but all of the costume is new, barring the shoes.)