Princes of the Apocalypse

As the title of this post implies, this image was painted for the recently released Dungeons & Dragons adventure, Princes of the Apocalypse.  It depicts a genasi (a Djinn or genie-like race) casting a draining spell on the orcs attacking her. I had a good time with the lighting and colors in this one, as well as the characters.

This artwork was commissioned by Sasquatch Game Studio who put together the book in cooperation with Wizards of the Coast. It was a pleasure to work with them!

Son of the Flame

This is my contribution to the new Hearthstone adventure, Blackrock Mountain. It's a fire elemental emerging from a pool of lava. It was a challenge to paint with such an ultra-warm palette since my natural inclination is toward cooler or more muted colors but hard work and some insightful art direction from Jeremy Cranford really helped bring this image together.

For those interested in such things, the entire digital painting was created in Adobe Photoshop, using a variety of brushes.

Groovy Robot

I've reached robot #70 in the series of robot designs I've been creating and posting on tumblr. You can see them all at: http://robotspot.tumblr.com

Since this is #70 in the series, I drew inspiration from 1970s-era design motifs and color schemes, as well as my memories of album covers and movie posters of the '70s. I had a blast designing this!

Original Artwork Available

I don't mention it here often, in part because I often work digitally, but most of my non-digital artwork is  for sale so if you ever see anything that interests you, please feel free to contact me.

I've just listed a couple of original acrylic paintings on Ebay. The first is the artwork for the Magic the Gathering card, Demonic Collusion and the second is a painting I did for the Mars Attacks: Invasion card set that was released in 2013 titled Action in the East (I think I've posted it here before). Both paintings were done using acrylic on watercolor paper. Please take a moment to check out the listings:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/121584332512?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

http://www.ebay.com/itm/121584317089?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

From the Archive: Unduur Angel

Here's another old image that never saw the light of day, an "angel" created for a short-lived game called Heroes & Havoc. I was supposed to do a bunch of these but the company went under right after I did this first one. It's a shame because it was nice working with them.

I don't remember many specifics about the character other than what is apparent in the artwork itself. The client wanted a tightly-rendered design and this character would have been seen on-screen as sort of a small avatar, floating above a circular base (like the base on a physical game piece). At some point in the game, the character would "sprout" glowing magenta wings (which couldn't be too intricate since they would be seen at a small size). The wing color indicated an affiliation so some other characters would have similar wings.

It was a fun assignment, even if it didn't end well! I've included  an image with wings, one without wings and a detail shot.

Transporter Lab: A Blast from the Past

I created this vector background illustration and the odd character at left for a project that never saw the light of day. This is old work (probably from 2000 or 2001) and I had almost forgotten about it but I came across the files a few days ago and thought I'd share them.

This is vector art. The background image was intended to be the front page of a website. A visitor to the site would use a character to select a destination on the screens. The character would then proceed into the green transporter device and the browser would take you to that destination. The whole thing was going to be an online, interactive amusement park for kids, which seemed like a great idea. I was going to design all the visuals but something went awry and the project died before we could get deeply into it. However, this Transporter Lab was fun to create and I got to draw upon my love of old cartoons when designing it!

If I remember correctly, the fine line around the shapes was a request of the client, perhaps so the character would "pop" against the background. I'm not sure. If i was doing this now, I'd use a variety of line weights to add interest.

The character itself was described pretty specifically so although I visualized it, it's hard to think of it as my creation. He's some kind of dot based on a satellite (thus the panels on his back and "radio waves" coming from his antennae).To me, he seems like the kind of weird character that ends up as an Olympic mascot, perhaps the product of a committee.

Whirling Zap-o-Matic

This crazy contraption was created for the game Hearthstone. The description called for a spinning, whirling mech with laser guns and other zapping implements.  It was fun to design! I painted it as if capturing a single frame in motion and I've included that version here but then I went back and added some "motion" brushstrokes and "echoes" of the firing beams to convey it's manic whirling. The entire image was painted in Photoshop.