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!