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With the Kickstarter for Project Eternity (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity) almost over, I've been thinking about the previous Infinity Engine games and the wonderful nostalgia I associate with them.

And by accident, I came across this piece of concept art for Icewind Dale 1, which I believe was painted by Jason Manley.
http://theartdepartment.org/faculty/jason-manley

And it hit me. I used this as reference, completely without realizing it at the moment. Icewind Dale, released in 2000, me painting a halfling druid in 2010. Ten years later, this image was firmly embedded in my brain.

It's not even a good copy! :D

Not a very deep or inspiring blog post, just something art related I noticed. Here, have some Jeremy Soule and his wonderful music for IWD!

Candy From a Stranger

Here are the last two black and white illustrations I did for Picks and Hoes. The more I've done of these, the more I started to enjoy myself. 

And here's a cover for a book soon coming out by Moon Design - a wonderful tome about the city of Pavis.
It's been done for quite some time now. It's not at all how I meant to do it, still I'm quite content with it.

This image was a challenge - a first real piece in colour (and a cover at that) I did after a long time of doing greyscale quarter-pagers.
I had a 3D model of the city, which was of huge help to me. Thank you, awesome Glorantha fans, who make 3D models like that. ;)
It was much easier to pick an interesting point of view while keeping the architecture and layout completely accurate this way.

As soon as we started talking about it with Jeff, I knew I wanted to have the sun play a major role - the first sketches were done in normal yellow midday sunlight, but a scene of worship atop a zikkurat just begged to be happening at sunset/sunrise.

And dragon worship used to be a big thing in Pavis, apparently, so I put in dragon banners waving in the wind, hints of dragon shapes in the smoke of the scensor and the scensor itself is shaped like a dragon too.

Then it was just getting the lighting and mood right, painting all those people in the square and keeping the perspective right on the priests.

Some random guy at Dragonmeet last year told me it had "good lighting", so I see it as a success. ;P

The Singing Sword cover

What sorcery is this?! A post with art? In colour? Your eyes do not decieve you. I have indeed picked up the virtual brush and put more than just black and white on my virtual palette.

This painting is a cover for a book called "The Singing Sword - Tea Dragon and Cat Demon". (written by Zbyněk Holub)

It's a fantasy novel about tea faeries. I don't know much more than that. Tea is important and so are the dragon and the panther - they're characters in the book and good friends.

(ArtRage as always)

(only now I realized I painted the foliage a bit like the leaves of green tea I've been drinking lately. Well, it fits. :))

Which singing sword do you like better? The one in the knightly Bugs Bunny episode? Or maybe Lilarcor in Baldur's Gate? :)

I came from the Black Hills

This is a "wot I think" kind of review of the Black Hills book by Dan Simmons.


I quite liked Simmons' previous books "Illion" and (less so) "Olympos".
If you're a bit older, you might've read the Hyperion series (my dad's favourite):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Simmons

 

So I bought Black Hills as a christmas present for my dad. The blurb sounded quite interesting, even though I'm not a Western fan.

What's it about? A Sioux boy with a strange talent touches Custer during the battle of Little Big Horn and Custer's "spirit" transfers into the boy's head.

I went into it expecting this to be the center of the story. It's not.

Black Hills is a book surprisingly similar to Terry Pratchett's "Nation".

A boy from a primitive society has a special talent involving talking to ghosts and gods. He falls in love with a white girl and his fate is (maybe) to save his people somehow, if he can.

They're both about the conflict of a modern way of life and the primitive way, which is seen as something pure.

Both books also contain a very moving, yet surprisingly clumsy confession of the authors - a confession of love for science. And hope for a better future with better humanity, which is only possible with the aid of science.

Both confessions are somehow expected, but very hamfistedly screwed into the endings.

I wish both of them went about it with more subtlety, but it's obvious this stuff is really important to them and they wanted to get it across.
Simmons adds both points of view though, usually through the eyes of Custer's ghost. Indians are certainly not idealized too much.

Black Hills is a difficult book to read. It's told retrospectively and not chronologically. It's well crafted though, so points of the substories are properly emphasized and the whole story manages to be done by the end of the book.

Simmons is guilty of some documentary-like descriptions and dialog, but I didn't mind that too much.
It's a tough read, some parts might not be exciting or interesting, especially stuff about bridges, building them, mining or sculpting of Mt. Rushmore.

And if the last 30 pages were condensed into 5 and if he handled the main message with subtlety, I would've been really extatic.

As it is, it's just a good book with an idea.

I've never been interested in the american indians, but I am now.

No art today, sorry!