Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Send in the Cavalry (More creatures)


Here are some more drawings for my current commission. The piece at the head of this post is a saurian cavalryman. The one below is a British cavalry man on an unconventional mount.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Creatures de Jour


So my inking brush crapped out and I had to buy a new one. The piece at the head of this post is drawn with the new brush, and it's been a life saver. I hadn't realized how miserable I was fighting with the old one to get a good line. The art store was out of the brush I wanted, so I settled for a Loew and Cornell brush. I'm having the damnedest time finding Winsor and Newton brushes right now. Grrrr....

Anyway, I'm finding a groove with these drawings. Brush and ink on Bristol board, as usual. The drawing in the pole position is described as a giant spiky insect. It has other effects in the game, but those don't really influence the depiction.

This is a variant of a bombadier beetle, whose poison actually ignites on contact with the air. A dangerous beastie.


This is a horse that's bred to be more like a pachyderm, with feet that are more like those of a rhino than a horse.


And another flying dino, one that is described as "storklike."



Enjoy.




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Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Another Creature Post


More creatures. I'll be working on this commission for a while. There are 47 drawings in the project and I'm only half-way through right now. Once this is done, it's the end of the Exile and then a couple of other projects I can't talk about right now. Anyway, these are ink on Bristol board as usual. I've been fighting with my inking brush, which is probably on its last legs. I don't think it has much life left in it, unfortunately.

The image at the head of the post is a sabertooth, of course, in the game itself described as having stripes. I've gone for more of a bobcat look than a tiger look, but it's hard to avoid the comparison. Stripes and all.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Even More Creatures and Such



My partner and I went to see Tim's Vermeer this weekend (a film I wrote about back in March after seeing it at True/False). One of the things that the film does well is demonstrate that even when you're using mechanical shortcuts, making art can be incredibly tedious. In the film, Tim spends over a week painting dots to represent the weave of a carpet. I can sympathize with him. Art is hard, boring work sometimes. Some people romanticize art, especially if they themselves are accountants or actuaries or some similarly mundane profession, but let me assure those people: my job can be just as mind-numbingly dull as yours.

A case in point is the above drawing for my current commission. It's a lizard. Sure. You would think drawing a lizard would be fun. But look at what I've done to represent scales. Nothing but dots. I don't know how Drew Friedman did it for all those years without going bonkers. Fortunately, I like the end result.

In the game mechanics, the lizard lives in this bush, which is based on an aloe plant.



And just to assure you that art is also often fun, there's this. It's an exploding ant (which has some basis in nature). This came together really fast, in part because part of it entailed splattering ink on the page, which is always a blast. I know a lot of people roll their eyes at the artistic worth of Jackson Pollock, but his methods are a gift to artists of all kinds. Seriously.




Anyway, enjoy.




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Thursday, April 17, 2014

Christopher Lee (The Devil Rides Out)


I broke out the watercolors today for a commission that I've been procrastinating on. I'm sure my client will be happy to see this one finished. I have one more outstanding commission that I really need to get to soon. That one is a bit more...whimsical...than this one. Anyway, I'm glad this is done.

This is Christopher Lee, of course, as Duc de Richleau, the hero(!) of The Devil Rides Out, a Terence Fisher production for Hammer in 1968. Lee looks sinister even as the good guy and he completely blows everyone else off the screen in this film. I like the film, but mainly for Lee. I wish it had a better villain, because Charles Gray was never a good choice for a bad guy (a lesson Diamonds Are Forever could have stood to learn). I fantasize about Peter Cushing playing the villain opposite Lee, but the misers in Hammer's front office weren't springing for more than one "name" per film at the time. Bastards. Anyway, this is brush and ink and watercolor on 140lb watercolor paper.





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Badger, Crab, Weird Thing.


Some more RPG illustrations. One thing this gig is good for: exploring ways to make textures with brush and ink. I'm having a blast creating surfaces in these drawings. Sumi-e ink on Bristol board.

This last beastie gave me fits. It's described as a "spikejawed sandhog" a critter related to ceratopsians, but not one. I did a  dozen pencil sketches before I arrived at this. Vaguely modeled on a warthog.





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I'm trying out Patreon as a means of funding my blogs. They don't have a widget yet, so this link will just have to do. If you like my writing and art and if you'd like to support Krell Laboratories and Christianne's Art and Comics, please come on over and pledge. Thanks.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Trikes and Willows



A couple of more drawings for my big RPG commission. The brief on the trike is for a pretty standard triceratops. I drew this twice, because the first version looked uncomfortably close to an awesome drawing by Bernie Wrightson. This bad boy is a little bit on the heavy side, which comes from looking at a lot of pictures of rhinoceroses, the closest living animal to a trike. Maybe he's just big-boned. The tree is a willow, of course, but in the game it's a particularly nasty creature that whips anyone who comes under it as a means of implanting seeds in an incubating host. Hence the skeletal offal at the base of the tree in this drawing. The drawing itself flirts with impressionism, which is fine. Both of these are brush and sumi-e ink on Bristol board.






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Sunday, April 6, 2014

Orchid and Ankylosaur


More stuff for my current illustration gig. One of these is a fanciful carnivorous orchid. Flowers are wonderful because they lend themselves to marvelous abstractions. The other drawing is another dinosaur, this one also based on an ankylosaur, but a very different, less spiky version. These were both brush and ink on Bristol, with a bit of Pitt pen on the orchid.





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Friday, April 4, 2014

Fanciful Creatures



Here are some more drawings for my current RPG contract. I'm drawing a lot of insects and dinosaurs for this commission, which would please the hell out of the twelve year-old me. I drew a lot of dinosaurs when I was a kid, and now I'm getting paid to do it. Dream big, kids. They come true some of the time. I'll be doing drawings for this assignment for a while. I think there are 47 drawings all told, of which I've done about a quarter of them.

The brief on these: the ant is an ant, obviously. In the game, it carries an electrical charge, hence the glowing spots on its carapace. The big critter is a variety of ankylosaur, used by the game's lizard people as a draft animal. This is an example of combining existing animals in a drawing to make the resulting fantasy animal credible. This draws from several types of turtles and lizards. It has the head of a snapping turtle and the legs and feet of a Galapagos tortoise, along with some other influences from horned lizards and ankylosaur fossils. It turned out better than I expected. The caterpillar is described as a "crawling wig," and when I went looking for references for such a thing, I turned up this! I went to pains to avoid just copying the real thing.

The ant is brush and ink and Pitt pens on Bristol board. The dino and "crawling wig" are entirely brush and ink on Bristol board.





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I'm trying out Patreon as a means of funding my blogs. They don't have a widget yet, so this link will just have to do. If you like my writing and art and if you'd like to support Krell Laboratories and Christianne's Art and Comics, please come on over and pledge. Thanks.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Exile page 13

The Exile of Natalie Rios page 13



Here's the next page of "The Exile of Natalie Rios". Mostly brush and ink on Bristol board. I don't think I used pens for much of this. I should be finishing this project up pretty soon. I hope. This is another relatively safe-for-work page. This is getting to be a habit. This page is considerably different from what Katie wrote for me. It's one of the pages I re-wrote in order to draw it more easily.

As always, the master post for this story is here if you need to catch up.





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I'm trying out Patreon as a means of funding my blogs. They don't have a widget yet, so this link will just have to do. If you like my writing and art and if you'd like to support Krell Laboratories and Christianne's Art and Comics, please come on over and pledge. Thanks.