Orc Death Knight

This is a third card for the World of Warcraft TCG set, War of the Ancients. The title and image should be self-explanatory so I'll talk briefly about technique. As I've mentioned before, I sometimes find it useful to paint an image purely in value, in tones of gray, so that I can focus on light and shadow first without worrying about color. That's the approach I took with this one, going from sketch to black and white "underpainting" to full color. The entire piece was created in Adobe Photoshop and for those who need to know such things, the color was added gradually, on layers, using several different layer modes (primarily overlay, color, saturation and normal mode).

Tauren Timewalker

Here's another card painting (created in Adobe Photoshop) from the recently release War of the Ancients set for World of Warcraft. It depicts a Tauren warrior, guarding a location called The Caverns of Time. Like the previous post, it's another relatively warm painting with a bright, hot color in the background. That pink hue worked well as edge lighting for the Tauren character.

This was one of those illustrations that just flowed out almost effortlessly. Sometimes a painting can be a real struggle from start to finish, involving a lot of tweaking and re-painting. This one went smoothly from start to finish... a rare treat!

Cho'gall

It's been a while since I've had new work I could post so I apologize for the long delay between updates. I've been "in the weeds", working on new projects, none of which can be shared publicly yet. Eventually, that should mean I have plenty to share with you. Meanwhile, I'll do my best to get back on a weekly update schedule.

The handsome fellow above is an ogre named Cho'gall. He was painted (digitally) for the World of Warcraft trading card game. I love painting big, ugly characters like this guy. The lighting was a challenge but I think it works and I gave myself an extra challenge (to go with Cho'gall's extra head) by using red as the sky color. Warm colors like red tend to come forward and cool colors tend to be recede so it's fun to try making a warm red serve as a background color once in a while.