Gods of the City Painting

Time really flies when you're busy! Sorry for my lack of posts lately. Between freelance work that I can't share, travel, and school I've managed to let this blog grow a bit stale. I'll try to pick up the slack a bit.

Here's something that isn't particularly new, but I haven't posted it here or on my website yet. This painting was created earlier this year as a "reaction" project that we were asked to do after a week-long contact period with the Hartford MFA program in New York.

For me, already currently living in New York, I wanted to do something a little different than Times Square or Central Park (not that there's anything wrong with those places). So I chose an area that I've always enjoyed since moving here seven years ago. The arches under the train bridge in Astoria park also known as the Hell Gate Bridge have often felt otherworldly to me. So using them as a backdrop, I let my imagination run free a little bit and arrived at the image below. 

For a while I was really unsure how I felt about the painting because it's a little different for me. But over the past few months I've received a good amount of positive feedback on it. I suppose i'm always my own worst critic.  

Gods of the City - 12" x 18" Oil on illustration board. 

Skull Soldiers

My, how time flies when you're busy! 

Between school and general freelance work i've been running like a madman these past couple of months. Luckily, in all of the lack of time to post anything here, lots of things have become available for me to finally show you. So hopefully i'll have time to get those things up more regularly for you.

First off, back in the fall of last year I started working with mobile gaming company Cygames, creating art for a card game called Rage of Bahamut. Though I think my work only appears in the Japanese version so far. It's a free app, so check it out if you want.

Similar to work I have done in the past for the Legend of the Cryptids game, the idea is that the player starts with a basic version of each character. Then by combining versions of the same card, the character is upgraded to an advanced version. With Bahamut however, the character can upgrade four times. So four illustrations are needed. 

My character was a basic skull soldier called Hell Lord Skeleton in-game. As far as i'm concerned if I can get a skull or skeleton in an image, it can't get any better. But it can! They wanted a skeleton leading an army of skeletons! And they are all being controlled by some kind of necromancer. So the idea was to start with a normal version that didn't have too many frills and very basic armor for stage 1. With each additional stage the armor gets more detailed and there's a few more guys in the background. In the final stage, he should be the ultimate skull soldier! Well needless to say, these were a whole lot of fun to do. Here's how they progressed:

All of them are 10"x12" Oil on illustration board.

MFA Adventures - Badru Sketch #1

Lately, i've been steady working both on freelance jobs and some images for my projects as a part of the Low Residency MFA in Illustration program at the Hartford Art School. If you remember back to this post I had done a quick book dummy for an alternate version of Jack and the Beanstalk set in an Orientalist setting. I may or may not continue with it entirely as part of my thesis project, but I still enjoy a lot of the imagery. So I figure I'll at least do a few of the spreads as paintings. Here's my first sketch for one of the paintings. 

Messing with Ink: Ningauble

So I've been meaning for a while now to play around with ink again, and last night I had a bit of extra time so started up this small drawing. I wasn't sure where to start since I haven't really used ink since school, but I had an extra piece of clay board lying around so I started with a quick pencil sketch on that. Then, I went in with a brush for the larger black areas, and detailed it out with Micron pen in some areas and scratched away with an x-acto (SO much better than those crap scratchboard nibs I had in school). I had a lot of fun messing around on this and I hope to continue to play with it in the future. The character is Ningauble of the Seven Eyes from the stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. 

5"x7" ink on clayboard

Princess of the Underworld Advanced

Last week I shared a new painting I had done for the app game Legend of the Cryptids. This week I'm sharing the second "advanced" version of the Princess of the Underworld. 

 In this version the princess went from being a more sympathetic non-threatening character to more powerful and intimidating. Her beloved skull from the "normal" version is also now incorporated into her staff, and she's brought all of hell to the fight. I definitely had a great time working on this one.

12"x16" Oil on illustration board

I'd also like to thank the AD, Misako, she was really a joy to work with. I think some American companies could take a cue from the Japanese. They really treat artists with respect and professionalism. 

Dragon 415: The Ghost Caravan

Hello everyone, it's been a while since i've posted on here...but what else is new? Things have been busy as usual around here. I've got quite a few things waiting in the wings that I can hopefully show soon. My girlfriend and I also took a little vacation to Norway two weeks ago. Maybe I'll get a post in about that in the coming days, but for now here's a new one I did not too long ago for an article in this month's Dragon Magazine. The article tells of a mysterious caravan that has been sighted on many occasions, and is believed to be ghosts, but is actually just a bunch of smugglers who travel in secrecy for the king.

8x18" Oil on illustration board

New Painting: Riding Hood

So I've finally managed to get settled back in after a great time at GenCon. I'm trying desperately to get back on track with my commissions, but in the mean time, here's a 

new-ish painting I finished up just before leaving last week. It's a twist on Red Riding Hood. Well, I guess the only thing that ties it to the story is that he's wearing a red hooded cape.

16"x22" Oil on board

I've also added it to my etsy page since it seemed that lots of people were interested in prints at GenCon. So go pick one up here!