SPYS!

Hey There,

Today I am posting up a few quick spot illustrations that I recently did for Expeditious Retreat Press's upcoming secret agent themed game " Classified".

These are only two of many so stay tuned for more.

Cheers!

Glorantha Part #2

Hey All,

It has certainly been awhile since my last post but rest assured, I have been busy. Today I am posting up Half of my recent Glorantha work I did for Moon Design Publications for the upcoming " Guide to Glorantha" which is due sometime in the early spring.

Some of these images have already been posted as either teasers or wallpapers as part of the kick starter campaign but this will be the first time I officially post them up on my site(s). I still have another half dozen or so pieces to share but you will have to wait until the release of the book for those.

Cheers and thanks for stopping by!

Hon - El The Dancer

The 5 Worlds

 

Lord Death on a Horse

 The Dragon Emperor

 Teshnan War Elephant

 The Immortal Bridge

The Banshee of Newry

Today I am posting a personal piece that I did for the art book for this years Calgary Comi Expo. The Theme is " Weird Tales" and I based mine off of an account by my Stepfather of a Banshee in his hometown of Newry in Northern Ireland. The name Banshee mean's Fairy Woman and to hear her wailing is considered a premonition of death. Tom has all kinds of stories about these things from back home and I couldn't resist taking a stab at illustrating one.

Evolution of a Trolllkin

Hey all,

I thought that for this post, I'd share some insight into the development process I went through with the good folks over at Kobold Press while working on their new character race the Trollkin.

I'm a longtime D&D gamer and in fact I cut my teeth on 2nd Edition and Dragon Lance modules and I'm always "game" to work on fantasy ip's.  So when the team at Kobold quarterly approached me to help them develop this new race for their setting, I was pretty stoked at the opportunity to create something relatively "New" to the fantasy world.  No Pressure right?..

So, the initial brief was for a playable race that is half human, half bad guy called a Trollkin. Trollkin are the product of interbreeding between a monster race like a Troll / Ogre and a human. Genetically, they are very diverse and it was very difficult to nail down a "look" for these guys. Well, it's pretty tough to nail these things on the first pass so I whipped up some really rough sketches to show my Art Director a couple of options for the Trollkin's look to help us hone in something that works. This first image is simply a series of heads to indicate some character and a sketch of a humanoid creature with a spear.

After this stage, the AD was able to have some visuals and was able to identify what he didn't like and provide me some direction moving forward. Next we have another image which is again pretty rough but it contained enough information for the AD to see that we were on the same page.

Ok, so now we are getting somewhere. Next I moved on to a tight drawing that incorporates all of the accumulated information thus far.

 

 Once again, I sent off another email to my AD to show him this image and get some final feedback and approval to move onto the finished image.

 

Finally, we arrived at the completed image that everybody is happy with. You'll notice the differences in this last image are rather subtle but do give the image just enough extra " Umph". Some things we changed were the addition of a shield, more pronounced claws, bigger spines on his back, more and "bushier" hair etc.

All of these images were completed digitally in Photoshop and that is the primary software that I use for illustration. I hope that you found this article informative and please drop me a line if you have any questions.

Cheers!

Ravens Call Adventure

Hi Everybody,
Recently I finished up a series of black and white illustrations for Kobold Press for their new Raven's Call adventure module.

Here are the images that I created for them below.

Kobold Scout:

 

Coalkell the Ogre:

 

The Damphir:

 Trollkin Shaman:

 

Village:

 

Trollkin:

Guildhall made the Top Ten!

This is a shameless plug but I`m throwing it down anyways. ;)

Last year I worked on a game for AEG titled Guild hall and guess what, it was `listed Guildhall as one of the top ten games they were introduced to in 2012! The review and top 10 list can be found HERE.

Another Blog!

Hey everyone.

For any one who is interested, the guys from the Daedalus Study group and I decided to start our own blog to continue our discussion on all things related to our profession. If you are so inclined, feel free to pop on over and chime in to our discussion as well as hear me sound off from my soap box.

Cheers!

Mike