Character portraits

Here are 2 character portraits I created for Dungeon #210. The second one depicts a half-orc (hence the enlarged canines). I tried to push the lighting in these 2 pieces more than I usually do and I was pleased with the results.

Stonehenge

Pen and ink was my "first love" as an artist and I return to it when I can. I like using it various ways, from bold brushwork to simple contour drawings or a combination of techniques. However, I've always admired artists who use the medium to do value drawings. I've dabbled in that in the past but I decided to try seeing what I could do with it if I applied myself to the task more often. To get started, I drew the picture of Stonehenge above. It's about 9" wide and the drawing was executed in india ink and crowquill pen on bristol. It wasn't the best bristol and was a little more absorbent than I'd prefer but it worked. The lines bled ever-so-slightly on the soft surface.

As I was working on the drawing, I also improvised a little study of standing stones to help me out. On both drawings, I limited myself to using a crowquill pen but in the future, I may try using tech pens and some brush in combination with the dip pen.

I don't consider this effort wholly successful but I'm happy with the results and I learned some things along the way. Hopefully, I can apply them to the next drawing and make it better.

Mordakhesh Triumphant

This is a painting I did last summer for Dragon magazine #416. As you can probably guess, Mordakhesh is the rakshasa character standing over the slain dragon. In D&D, the hands of rakshasa characters are reversed on the arms, which is tricky to draw. It's very counter-intuitive to draw something backwards like that. It just feels wrong!

I had a lot of overlapping and darker elements to deal with in this picture so I chose to paint it in gray before applying color, which was built up slowly, in "glazes" on digital layers. I was very pleased with the results so I hope you enjoy them.

More Sketches

Here are a few sketchbook drawings created while I was just doodling for fun. The little ghost girls and the "steampunk kids" were sketched a year or so ago. The other sketches are recent.