New Art: Dragon 408 "Stormraider"

At long last I have some new fantasy art available to share. This here is from the current issue of Dragon magazine #408. We have a female elf Stormraider who bravely rides her magical skiff through a sea of elements...which kind hurts the brain logistically when it comes to painting such things, but I think it turned out alright. I had a great time working on this one and the AD, Kate Irwin, was a joy to collaborate with.

10"x22" Oil on illustration board

Titanic: Time Voyage, the Interiors

Today I will share with you some of the pencil interiors I did for book 1 of the Titanic series. 
These were fun getting to put the characters back on the docks of 1912. It's also not very often that I get to do finished pencil drawings so have a look:

"Welcome to the storeroom."

One of the magical objects that zaps our characters back in time. I actually drew this one as the violin alone, but later it was decided  to add the case for it. So I drew it separately and combined them digitally.

The Kearney's (The one's we don't want to get on that ship)

"That's a big ship!" 

Lyssa Drawing

Today I thought I'd break up my Titanic posts with a drawing I did recently. I had started on this in hopes to enter it into the " Art Evolution Challenge" over at The Art Order, but as usual lately, I ran into a few things that had to take presidence over it. So instead of rushing to get it done by the short deadline I decided to take my time on it and make it into a nice personal piece. I'll be working on it over the next few weeks in between my other projects so stay tuned for updates.

14"x20" charcoal and digital

Return To Titanic Part 2: The Covers

Here's the four covers I did for the Return to Titanic book series. These were a lot of fun to do and were a bit of an interesting exercise in color progression. I've put in both the original painting and the final cover designs so you can see the space restrictions I was working with. For this series we wanted to make sure that the covers would work together as a group, but also to reflect the moods of each book. Looking through the images take note of the tones and colors of each cover. 

As we  can see, in book 1 the mood is bright and hopeful ready for the adventure.

Book 2 is still adventurous and hopeful, but now we have an air of urgency in the characters. The colors are becoming a little bit darker.

Now things are getting pretty intense! Much darker here, but still some warmth and light amongst the chaos.

And at last we have the final chapter in this exciting series. The ship's gone down, characters are lost....a dark book indeed. But still there is a small bit of light for the future.

Up next: We'll take a closer look at the interiors from Book 1.

All images are © copyright 2012 Capstone Publishing 

Titanic Characters Revealed

So, as I've been mentioning over the past few months, the "Return to Titanic" book series that I worked on most of last year has finally been released! Check them out at the publisher's website here.
This project was a huge learning experience for me. Not only did the project contain the first book i've done both the cover and interiors for, but there was four of them! Each book required between 22-28 pencil drawings. About 100 drawings with 4 covers in just under seven months (on top of a full time job), was definitely a real lesson in time management (or time crunch!). Also, having such a tight deadline and not knowing any 11-13 year old kids that fit the character descriptions required a crash course on: Learn really fast how to make you and your girlfriend into any and every character in the books. So yes, every single person on the covers and drawings is either me or my girlfriend. It's a bit tricky...especially when it has to be made consistent throughout the series. One thing that helped a lot was quick character studies that Bob, the most super amazing, communicative, nicest, cool guy,  art director ever, had me do before anything. Here's what they looked like:

Tucker

Maya

Liam

Tucker's Mom, Mrs. Paulsen

Liam's Dad, Mr. Kearney

Mrs. Kearney

Captain Smith

John Coffey

Burt Terrell

Violet Jessop

John Jacob Astor

Madeline Astor

And just for fun here's a photo I took of all the interior drawings covering my living room (it's small, but still!) floor:

Up next: The covers!

Titanic Teaser Trailer

Hey everybody! the clocks just been ticking in fast forward lately. I've been busy with some new game art the past month or two. But i've also been anxiously awaiting the release of the young adult book series that I worked on for the better part of last year. While I haven't gotten the green light to do any full fledged posts yet, I did come across this awesome (and hilarious, at least for me) teaser video for the books staring my drawings. Check it out!:

I'm still here!

Well, it's been far too long since I've been able to post anything new on here! Between this big project i've been wrapping up lately, and my annual Egypt travel there hasn't been much in the way of time or material to be shared unfortunately. But the wait is over! 


I just found out today that an interview I did a little while ago for Apex Magazine is up! They also used Mother Nature for the cover image.

Go check it out here!

Hopefully more to come soon!

2012 back to 1912

I've recently been informed that I can finally share the first cover painting to the book project i've been working on! 
Now, I can't say much about it yet, but it's from a new young adult adventure series being put out in January of next year by Stone Arch books. And, it's based on the Titanic! 
Much different from my normal work, I know, but it's been a fun project to work on so far, and I can't wait to share more of it. 

©Stone Arch Books

Red Five

I'm happy I get to share this new painting that was recently spoiled for the brand new Star Wars card game from Fantasy Flight Games. It was lots of fun getting to work on something in the Star Wars universe since I've been a fan for such a long time. Also, it was a nice diversion from my usual fantasy work.

Red Five - 11x13" Oil on illustration board

Con Sketches

Here's a quick post of a couple of the sketches I did for people at Gencon this past weekend. 
One the first day of the show some nice folks came up to me and asked "would you draw our playmat for us?" Being kind of surprised and confused since i've never done such a thing I said, "Umm...sure!" And after a short discussion about pricing and subject matter I was off. 


It turns out that she liked mermaids and elves and such so here's what I ended up with:

I'm really quite bad at drawing in front of people...or at least, bad at starting a drawing in front of people. Once I have things sorted out with proportions i'm fine to draw while others watch, but I have a serious mental block if someone is standing over me from the start. Thankfully, they let me do my thing and came back the next day for the mat.


A couple other quick ones that were a bit less involved:

This one had cool sketches from some of the other great artists at the show. Mine's on the top right. It's cool to be on there with them.

In the end, I thought it was nice to do quick sketches for people. It's truly an honor to have someone appreciate your work enough to want a custom drawing. Now I just need to get a bit faster at it!