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.

Gnomes and Faces

I've been doodling gnomes and fun faces in my sketchbook lately. Enjoy!

Initiative

I've been very busy personally and professionally for the past few months but unfortunately, as is often the case in this business, I can't show you anything I've been working on yet. Instead, here's a D&D illustration I did a few years ago. I was very pleased with the poses and line of action in this one.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season!

More Character Illustrations

Here's another pair of bards created for Paizo's NPC Codex. Like last week's characters, there's an elf and a dwarf but hopefully their appearance and personalities appear distinctly different from the pair I posted last week. I hope you enjoy them.

Character Illustrations

Here are a pair of bards, a dwarf and an elf created for Paizo Publishing's recently released NPC Codex (for those unfamiliar with roleplaying game lingo, an NPC is a "non-player character"). I painted two dwarves and two elves for this project. I'll post them in pairs, along with the drawings.

I actually prefer the preliminary line drawings for these characters to the painted finals. Looking back, it would have been nice to do these in pen and ink and watercolor as opposed to the all-digital I approach I took to the drawings and paintings. Nevertheless, I like the final artwork and I hope readers and players of Paizo's Pathfinder game will like it too. The NPC Codex book itself is simply loaded with artwork and is well worth checking out.

Mind Flayers

This Photoshop painting of a pair of Mind-Flayers leading a hypnotized drow (basically a dark-skinned elf for those who don't know) down a hallway was a real challenge so I thought I'd share the process. I won't go into too much detail describing it since I think the images speak for themselves. I began with a line drawing (not included here but typical of the preliminary line drawings I've posted with other paintings). I then painted the figures and the basics of the surroundings in gray, using basic Photoshop brushes. I began adding color, texture and detail, making changes as the picture progressed. The textures were created by pasting texture images over the painting, adjusting the transparency and distorting the texture image to match the perspective. Further texture was added using custom brushes. As you can see, my initial instinct to use an intense gold backlighting gave way to a much more muted choice. The wall relief was loaded into the painting from the preliminary drawing and If I remember correctly, I simply made a Levels adjustment to to darken the colors where the line drawing was loaded. I then painted back into the walls, to finish the piece off.

I've included a detail of the characters. I hope you enjoy the piece and I hope all of this is enlightening!