Scott Sketches: Duel Masters: Onigunso, Hammer of Anger

Earlier this year I got an email from art director Dawn Murin over at Wizards of the Coast. She was looking for artists to create work for the japanese card game Duel Masters. I had heard of the game before but never really knew much about it. Especially since it was a game played mostly by japanese boys between the ages of 10-14, and the art was completely different from my typical style. But for this project, she was trying something new, and that was to try and incorporate a more "western" realistic art style into the Duel Masters brand. In hopes to make it stand out a bit more from the other Japanese card games. So I said "sure!" and thus began my journey.

For this guy the description was as follows:

He's an alien humanoid that is about 14 feet tall, chubby rather than muscular like he never lost his baby fat, and dimwitted. Instead of hands, he has giant steampunk-esque mechanical ball maces, and he's covered in glowing tribal/alien tattoos.

Now having researched some previous art for Duel Masters, I realized that everything was pretty over the top and crazy. Most things just didn't make sense. I needed to make him pretty big and weird and aggressive, while maintaining my usual painting style.

Here's a few of my thumbnails, as I did a lot...They're pretty much just the the big dude flailing about in different directions since the game is about in-your-face monsters fighting each other:

©Wizards of the Coast

So we decided to go with thumbnail #6, and off I went to take various akward photos of myself and build little ball maces out of sculpey to help with lighting on them. Also, as a last minute addition, the publisher decided that this character is controlled by a summoner. Luckily there was a good empty space on the left where I could sneak him in:

I've been doing most of my final drawings in charcoal for a while now, but lately I'm also doing quite a bit in photoshop to help set up the lighting and add some extra details. It saves me time in the long run.

Gladly, the sketch only required a couple tiny changes and It was off to the finish. Being designated as a "fire" card type helped me to determine the red colors for his skin in this one, but a bit of tweaking in my photoshop color study helped me to settle on the blues for the secondary color.