Hearthstone: Vryghoul

This is my painting for Vryghoul, a card in the new Hearthstone expansion, Knights of the Frozen Throne. I've included my preliminary sketch with the painting. I had a blast painting this zombie-like character and I'm grateful for art director Jeremy Cranford's very helpful suggestions.

Meaningless aside that might interest someone: I often listen to audiobooks as I work and I was listening to Stephen King's Different Seasons while painting this picture. The book and subject matter went together well.

More Inked Characters

Here are a few new characters I've recently drawn in pen and ink. In case anybody is curious, my method for these is very straightforward. I just start sketching on Strathmore 500 bristol (vellum surface) and once I've arrived at a character design I like,  I ink it using Micron pens. It's a very relaxing process.

More Ink Characters

Here are a few more animal characters drawn in pen and ink. All of these drawings so far have been made in india ink on bristol board, using micron pens.

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.

Castles

I have a couple of older works to share today, although I plan to post some new art this week.

The first piece is a watercolor created for the The Practical Guide to Fairies. The Grig watercolor I posted last month appeared in the same book. This picture depicts a small, underwater sandcastle, a place where small aquatic faerie folk dwell.

The second piece is a pencil drawing of a castle I did a few years ago for a Swedish company called Riotminds.

For those interested in such details: the watercolor was painted on Arches hot press watercolor paper and the pencil drawing was simply drawn with an ebony pencil on Strathmore drawing paper.

Dreamblade Designs

I did these miniature designs for Dreamblade years ago. If I remember correctly, at least two of them weren't produced, so this is the first time at least some of these drawings have seen the light of day. As always with miniature designs, I created a front and back view for the sculptors to work from.

The first image is an "electric sheep". He's actually more of a steampunk sheep because the idea was to create something with a clockwork or industrial revolution feel rather than a more contemporary robot sheep. I've always been very fond of this drawing.

The second entry is the truly disgusting Pus Cannon and this one may have been produced (I honestly can't recall). My assignment was to design a creature that literally had an organic cannon on it's back. It was to be covered in lumps and sores, some of them oozing. Yes, it's gross and yes, it was a blast to draw and yes, you're probably relieved that this piece isn't in color!

The third design was a great idea and I wish it had been produced. The concept was to have an invisible, gelatinous blob creature (not unlike the green, blobby aliens in some episodes of Futurama) that used a fake, friendly grandmother as a lure, like an anglerfish uses a dangling light to lure prey. If the miniature had been produced, the grandmother would have been made of opaque, painted plastic and encased in the blob, which would have been made of clear plastic. It would have been awesome! Ah, what could have been... unfortunately, they decided it was going to be too difficult to pull off.

H. P. Lovecraft podcast

This weekend I joined Matt, Dave and Jason of the Bookhouse Boys podcast on their special Halloween episode for a discussion of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, other Lovecraft (and Lovecraft inspired) works and horror in general. We had a great time! Please download the podcast and hear what we had to say (but if you haven't read much Lovecraft, be aware that there are "spoilers" in the episode):

http://bookhouseboyspodcast.podomatic.com

The picture you see above is a drawing I did several years ago for a Lovecraft edition of Graphic Classics. It was inspired by a trip to Angkor in Cambodia. Many of the ruins there are covered in dense, beautiful relief sculpture and since that sort of thing plays a role in some of HPL's stories, I decided to work elements of the Cthulhu Mythos into a relief. I don't think I've ever had more fun working on a drawing!

Graphic Classics comics can be found at http://www.graphicclassics.com

Bat-Mite and Batgirl

Since I will be at Wizard World Chicago this weekend, here's something a little different: ink drawings of comic book characters!

The first two drawings are of Bat-Mite, an impish character that's been appearing in Batman comics on and off since the early '60s. I've always liked the character and did the first drawing while at the Summit City Comic Con earlier this summer. The second drawing is much closer to the original character design which, if I'm not mistaken, was drawn by Batman artist Dick Sprang.

Rounding off this trio of bat-drawings is Batgirl, a character I've liked since Yvonne Craig charmed me on the old Batman TV show when I was a kid.

All 3 drawings are for sale and I'll be doing more of them at the con this weekend so if you're interested in purchasing a drawing, checking out some original art or just saying "hi", please stop by my table (#3501) at Wizard World Chicago, in Artist's Alley.

If you're interested in purchasing or commissioning a drawing, you can contact me at: jim@jimnelsonart.com.

Dreamblade: 4-Armed Sentry

This is another miniature design turnaround I did for the Dreamblade miniatures game a few years ago. It's a 4-armed Sentry/warrior with a distinctly ancient southeast asian vibe.

Octorilla and the Reluctant Beast

Things are a bit crazy here at Casa Jim right now, as I plunge ahead on various deadlines. Consequently, I'm continuing with this week's theme of posting Dreamblade miniature drawings. A lot of this work hasn't seen the light of day except as tiny drawings printed on cards and, of course, in the form of the final sculpted miniatures. I hope people enjoy seeing it.

The first of these two drawings shows a creature called (for obvious reasons) an Octorilla.

The second is called Reluctant Beast. The idea was to design a formidable monster that's downright timid and cowardly. His pose and posture needed to reflect that so I tried to reinforce it with everything from a tightly curled tail to "puppy dog" eyes. It was really fun to work on something like this that goes against type.

More Dreamblade

Here are a couple more miniature turnarounds I did for Dreamblade. I certainly miss working on this game! It always presented new and unusual challenges. The Hungry Ghost miniature design, pictured above, is an excellent example of the kind of challenges Dreamblade provided. In Tibetan Buddhism, hungry ghosts serve as a metaphor for people's attempts to attain their physical desires. Some are said to have "mouths the size of a needle's eye and a stomach the size of a mountain". That's a striking image and a concept I needed to capture as a figure that could be cast in plastic! I had a great time figuring out how to accomplish that and the design I ended up with is one of my favorites.

The second image above is a friendly monster, a creature that was supposed to be part building/statue and part monster. I drew on Maurice Sendak's monsters for inspiration and tried to capture the spirit of the monsters he drew in "Where the Wild Things Are" without simply aping his designs. Hopefully, I succeeded. Unfortunately, I don't think this miniature was ever produced.

Dreamblade Monster

Several years ago, I found myself doing a lot of "turnaround" designs for miniature figures (to be used, of course, in tabletop miniatures games). I hadn't done much of that sort of work before but I found I had a knack for it and really enjoyed it. One of the games I worked on was Dreamblade, a somewhat surreal game that involved warring factions of dream creatures that fell into categories like Valor, Fear, Madness and Passion. Today's drawing fell into the Madness category. My assignment was to create a creature whose head consisted of two crocodile heads combined, sideways. It's a cool idea and I ran with it, envisioning the monster as a sort of kaiju (a Japanese word meaning "strange beast"), something along the lines of movie monsters like Godzilla or Gamera. Because it belonged to the Madness faction, it's body contains some (hopefully) unsettling characteristics.

More Hammerfast

I'm immersed in an assignment right now (painting some beings from Japanese mythology) so here are a couple more character drawings from the aforementioned Hammerfast project.

Hammerfast

Back in the Fall of 2009 I had a rare opportunity to do some pen and ink drawings for a Dungeons and Dragons project called Hammerfast. I was in the midst of preparing for a trip to Paris when I began the assignment and I couldn't finish before I left so I took approved sketches with me, refined them and prepared them to be inked while I was in France. I inked them as soon as I returned home so I could get them in to a very understanding art director. None of that has much to do with the final drawings themselves but my illustrations for Hammerfast will always be linked with that trip in my mind.

The two drawings posted above are from the Hammerfast project. They depict a dwarven ghost, a dead sentinel roaming the walls of a city and a three-headed dragon named Calastryx.