How I do things

The wonderful people at Cubicle 7 have been nice to put up an interview Iain Lowson did with me. I talk about  making of the cover for the Dark Harvest anthology. (that Frankenstein monster with a train)

http://www.cubicle7.co.uk/2013/01/tales-of-promethea-author-spotlight2/

I know I described my process in the previous blog post in more detail, but this might be of interest to some as well. Maybe. Who knows? I don't. I hint at a secret exciting project too!

CAKE!

It's alive!

It's alive and well.

What is? The Creature of course!

Recently I've had the wonderful opportunity to paint a new one for me - the Frankenstein monster!

The most generous and busy Jon Hodgson passed me this opportunity - to work with Iain Lowson on a cover image for his Dark Harvest anthology.

http://www.darkharvest-legacyoffrankenstein.com/

What if Frankenstein got it right? What if Victor Frankenstein had embraced his discoveries rather than seeking to destroy them?...

Dark Harvest: Legacy of Frankenstein is a detailed, fascinating game setting, a terrifyingly plausible alternative history and a fiction anthology; a gothic horror fantasy that will appeal to gamers and the general public alike. 

 The brief I got asked for the Creature watching a Promethean train (the flaming hand logo included and illuminating the rail tracks) from across Danube (over the Iron Gates gorge), looking grim and powerful.

Which is quite the compositional puzzle. Here's what I sent Iain along with the sketch.

The image as described in the brief gave me quite a headache. There's a compositional issue as well as a narrative one - how to show both the train and the creature (and their interaction in the story), as they're important elements, clearly at the same time?  

At first I did a more of a landscape shot and angle - behind the creature's shoulder, silhouetting him against the moonlit gorge with a rather tiny train going along in the distance. That felt a bit boring, as there wasn't much motion in the train, we couldn't see the design, Promethean logo and all that. Nor could we see the creature's face with his "grim look".

I looked at the previous covers and was intrigued by the first one - the idea to combine different shots into one image and create a collage. I've never done this as the kind of illustration I do isn't suitable for this approach. But here it seemed like it might work.

Trying to tie it even more into the existing material, I used a similar angle for the train bit as it appears in the comicbook page I have as reference. I put the creature on a rocky slope, actually climbing, or hanging off the rock. (hoping to put some latent strength and implied force in his pose)

The sketch was approved and I went from there. The Creature turned out to be a joy (!) to paint. The face (which is a part I always spend the most time on) was done in about half an hour! 

The train on the hand took a while. I haven't painted a train before, and even this one is more of an idea of a train, rather than something actually functional. Steam implying speed and movement and the train's lights also proved a bit tricky to paint.

Iain liked the final result, but felt we needed to make it more obvious the Creature isn't massive and dangling right above the train. To do that I lightened up the seams between the two parts of the image, putting more distance between them. I also added a colour shift, from a greenish moonlit side of the gorge to a colder blue one where the train is going.

Here's the final cover! (as always, painted from scratch in ArtRage Studio Pro)

Thanks for watching!

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? :)

My portfolio needs YOUR help!

I decided to do more colour paintings for the portfolio. I've been collecting reference - all kinds of colour paintings I might learn something useful from.

If you have a couple of minutes, please, post links to one or two fantasy book covers, RPG covers or just colour illustrations/paintings YOU think are awesome.

Thanks in advance!