Sea Battle

This one is a scene I did as a two page spread for Barbarians of Lemuria (on DriveThruRPG now!). It was meant to have titles on it so I had to avoid solid blacks (#sadface) and I had to consider it both as a whole and as being seen on two individual pages, meaning the composition had to try and work on two halves, which is always a little tricky.

I had an awesome time doing the water on this. I love it so much I could just have that, but a load of abstract brush strokes don't usually sell books. Doing water is one of the legendary bugbears of artists, so I was pretty hesitant going into this. But, I played around with some of the brushes available in Sketchbook and came out with this.

The good thing was that the little stories I came up with for these illustrations actually made it into print in the final book as descriptive flavour text. I always find it best to construct a narative around a piece and then try and show a snapshot of it. That way I have more of a feeling for the characters and action. It helps me keep interest in the piece which, in turn, gives it more energy (at least to me).

(All done in Sketchbook on my Samsung Galaxy Note 3, as always.)

Fortress of the Witch Queen

Another piece for Barbarians of Lemuria (available now on DriveThruRPG *cough*), this one was to be the background image; spread across two pages; repeated throughout the book.

Settling on a composition was hard enough, as you can see from some of the roughs, as each half idealy needed to work on its own when a page was viewed separately. Not only that, but I had to avoid any strong lines or areas of high contrast, as text was going to be laid over it.

I tried to emulate two sources here, the work of Hiroshi Yoshida and that of thr film 'Fire and Ice' by Ralph Bakshi.

Yoshida's work has such depth and emotion and conveys natural elements so beautifully. I was struggling with the water and I thought, 'who does water better than Yoshida?' Nobody, that's who.

And 'Fire and Ice' was such a massive influence on my childhood: I watched it every Saturday morning, along wirh 'Empire Strikes Back' and 'Enter the Dragon' (if you know me, you know that I can pretty much be summed-up by those three films to this day!).

Obviously, what I ended up with falls horrifically short of these two pieces of inspiration, but you have to reach for the stars, don't you? As an artist I will always be disappointed by everything I do, so I might as well give myself just cause to be!

The image conveyed here is that of our hero, Thongar, approaching the Fortress of The Witch Queen in Satarla. He has forsaken an all out assault with his companions in favour of stealing in on his own in a small fishing boat, with the intention of killing the evil sorceress and ending her dark reaign once and for all. The bay is empty and there are no guards; as if she knew he was coming; as if she were inviting her enemy in.

To this day no-one knows what happened that night, but both Thongor and The Witch Queen still live...

Witch Queen

I can start revealing some of my work for the Barbarians of Lemuria Mythic Edition RPG now (available on DriveThruRPG.com now) so here is a little step-by-step process on one of the full page illustrations which I did for it.
The Witch Queen. She had to be quite sexy in an oldschool sword and sorcery way, but also powerful and in control. So, she's looking down, standing on the battlements of her castle with some chained slaves at her feet: kind of the reverse of what you would usually have a man pictured doing in this kind of thing.
I worked out a new way to do fire and sparks on this one, inspired by the work of Brad Rigney. While I came nowhere near his magic, I am pretty pleased with my discovery. I always try to push myself to learn something new on each piece.
The moon came out nice as well.

Barbarians of Lemuria: Mythic Edition

The Barbarians of Lemuria Mythic Edition RPG is finally out!

I did some of the best work I've ever done on this book and am so happy to have it unleashed on the world.

I will post some samples and process articles soon, but in the meantime, get on over to DriveThru and download the df. If you like sword and sorcery (and who doesn't?) you will be doing yourself a favour.

rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/144526?src=DTRPGG+

River of Heaven process

Here is a little process for one of the bestiary images for River of Heaven (available now on DriveThruRPG).

The brief was for a Raptor alien species. Essentially a mix of dinosaur and xenomorph: savage predators living in hive-like catacomb spires. I wanted a big lot of teeth and ripped a little more from a T-Rex than a Velociraptor just to make it a little different. Long arms with prehensile hands convey a hint of 'civilisation'. I chose purple for the base to, again, make it a little different. Complimentary shades of green and grey were used for details.

Flats. Shading (on a solid layer of black, details erased out and opacity dropped) and Tones (you can see the palette I used at the bottom: colour-picked from here as I went on). Textures were painted onto the skin with rough brushes and picked out of the shading.

All work done in Sketchbook on Samsung Galaxy Note 3 phone.

River of Heaven

rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/137589/River-of-Heaven

Well it is finally out so I can share with you some of the art which I did for the River of Heaven RPG from D101Games.
I did the whole of the book except the cover, which was done by the mighty John Hodgson before I came on board.

Great game: you should check it out.

(I didn't do this logo by the way, it's just on here as a header.)

Carpathia Gypsy Character

Here is an exclusive preview of one of the sample characters for the Carpathia! RPG.

I've been sitting on this for a while now as I'm currently hard at work on other projects but I wanted to share this with you to show that the project is still moving ahead and that I haven't dropped off the face of the earth.

While other paying projects have to take priority (some of which are awesome fun; I can't wait to share them with you!) Carpathia is very close to my dark heart at all times. Particularly at this time of year.

This was all done in Sketchbook on my phone, as usual.