SolForge Drawings

One of the trickier things about being an illustrator is switching gears between projects that require a different mentality or style. I had to do this quite a bit last year. Fortunately, that switch can be fun too!

I worked on some cards for the online card game SolForge (published by Stone Blade Entertainment) last year but the approach was very different from my usual method. I was asked to do clean line drawings that would then be colored. As a lifelong comic book reader and someone who's done a bit of work in comics as well, I'm very familiar with this sort of approach and the idea of passing a line drawing along to someone else to finish in color appealed to me. I was interested in seeing how someone else would interpret the underlying work.

I was under the impression the coloring would be done "comic book style", along the lines of this Kaiju artwork I did for Stone Blade, but it ended up being much more opaque and painted. It's very different from what I expected or what I would have done myself but that was inevitable, especially because I had no contact with the artists who colored the work.

Another aspect of these cards is that each one involved a sequence of 3 images. I haven't had a chance to play the game but as I understand it, this has to do with the game mechanics. Each image involves an increase in power of some kind so characters or creatures grow larger, spells manifest, energy is released, etc.

I'm sharing two examples of cards I drew, along with images of the final cards, colored by some unknown souls out there. The first set of images is titled Tuskin Sporelord and involves a character bringing large mushrooms to life. The second depicts a titan.