Mars Attacks!

This summer, I had the pleasure of working on the new set of cards for Mars Attacks! I'm a big fan of the wild, lurid art on the original Mars Attacks trading cards released in the 1950s so this was an exciting project for me. The work in the set is all painted using traditional materials so these illustrations are painted in acrylics. However, the deadline was a bit tight so to save time, I did a bit of digital re-touching and modification in the images above just to pull the final art together.

Stylistically, I tried to paint like myself while also capturing some of the style of the original Mars Attacks art so hopefully, that comes through. The great Earl Norem, who also did some work on the set and who has done some excellent Mars Attacks paintings over the years, was an inspiration as well.

The new set is called Mars Attacks: Invasion and it should be available this month!

Inktober Day #3

I drew this little dragon for the 3rd day of "Inktober". I need to switch bristols. I tried a new one but it bleeds too much and it's holding back my line. Nevertheless, I hope you'll like this drawing. The character was fun to create.

Inktober

Artist Jake Parker and some of his friends have started a tradition known as "Inktober" in which artists are encouraged to celebrate the wonderful medium of ink by doing an ink drawing every day. I like the idea and I love ink so I'm participating. Here are my first two Inktober drawings.

Both drawings were done with a crowquill pen and india ink on bristol board. The originals are for sale. Please contact me if you're interested.

Dragon Fight!

This piece was painted in Photoshop for Paizo Publishing's recently released Quests & Campaigns book for the game Pathfinder. Vertical formats always present unique and interesting challenges, especially when dealing with large differences in scale (like that between a human character and a large, flying dragon). I had a good time with this one!

Orc Rogue

Here's a Warcraft painting from the Caverns of Time Set. It appeared on a card titled Razor Hill Lout but when I painted it, it was just "Orc Rogue" (the titles on game cards often change or added later in the process). I actually prefer the drawing of this one so I've included it above. I felt the character lost a little something in the transition from drawing to painting, which will happen sometimes. Nevertheless, I'm happy with the final art.

Rocket Ranger

This is one of several dwarves I painted for Cryptozoic Entertainment's upcoming game, Hex. I can't show most of them yet but this was probably my favorite of the bunch and the image has been posted on the Hex site so I can share it with you now.

The version with the green components was the first take and I was asked to change the greens to bright reds. I think it works both ways but I'm partial to the green version.

World of Warcraft: Reign of Fire

I apologize for allowing this blog to slip into relative silence this summer. Hopefully, some of you have been checking out my robot blog on Tumblr at http://robotspot.tumblr.com.  I have plenty of artwork to post to this blog now so this should be a busy place over the next few weeks. Some of that artwork is from the recently released World of Warcraft card set, Reign of Fire. Sadly, Blizzard Entertainment have announced that this will be the last set created for the game so I post this with bittersweet feelings. I've been working on the Warcraft card game for years and it's been both a challenge and a pleasure. The game has stretched my color sensibilities and offered many new challenges and I'm grateful that I've had the opportunity to contribute to it and collaborate with fine art directors like Jeremy Cranford, Ben Thompson, Doug Alexander and David Baron. Many thanks to all!

Here are 3 digital paintings created for Reign of Fire: Elwynn Huntsman, Circlet of Nobility and Permafrost. I tried something a little different on Elwynn Huntsman. The human characters in the Warcraft online game have very unique proportions and I wanted to paint something in my style that really looked like a human straight from the game. I don't know if I pulled it off but I had fun trying and the forested area the hunter is cautiously exploring was a blast to paint.