Work Process, Early November

I'm trying to slog to the end of my current big project. I'll be done with it by the end of November if it kills me. That still doesn't prevent hiccups from happening.

This piece is described as basically barbarians vs. giant plasma monsters, with some other game-specific instructions like what weapon the barbarian woman is holding and such. The under-drawing was quick (I did it while I was chatting with a friend on Google+ as it so happens):

Detailed, eh? Most of the fun comes in the inking stage. Here's the inked drawing. I didn't like the trailing figure, so I drew a the archer instead as I inked it:

But this drawing has a couple of problems. One is an inking accident in the lower part of the drawing on the feet and legs of the two male barbarians. You can see the white paint on the thigh of the archer that I used to cover the smear there, and there's another smear under the left foot of the swordsman. Additionally, the aspect ratio is wrong. The size of the space this fits in in the final book is 2.6:5, so it's too narrow. You can also see the edge of the paper on the left side of the drawing. To the Photoshop! I corrected the contrast to get rid of the page tone of the paper, plus the stray pencil strokes that I failed to erase, I used the clone stamp tool to get rid of the ink smears, and I widened the image and extended the landscapes. These I just drew directly with my Wacom tablet (why am I not working digitally on this project? I'm not fast with digital tools, or, at least, not noticeably faster than I am with traditional materials, which I like). Here's the final version I sent to the client:

This next drawing went off without a hitch. The image popped into my mind and the drawing went very quickly. For inspiration and reference, I looked at bunch of photographs of dancers in a production of "The Rite of Spring" choreographed by Pina Bausch. This will be reproduced in a tiny space, so a lot of detail would get lost, so this is fairly simple:

Belatedly, the client suggested that I cover the naughty bits. This surprised me a bit, because the other books in this series don't shy away from harder material and this book has plenty of gore in it. There's a dancer pulling her face off in this image, after all. But, that's fine. I'm a very compliant collaborator most of the time. Again: to the Photoshop! My client suggested fur bikinis for these figures, but I didn't like that idea, so I went with something a little more civilized:

This is ultimately an example of the practice of drawing a naked figure and then drawing clothes on top of them, which is well-familiar to artists of comics. Anyway, I'm pushing through this. Here's a bonus image, one that went through more or less without a hitch, though it's more "sketch-like" than most of the other stuff I've done for this project. The dinosaur is modeled on the skeleton of a giganotosaur, and you can't actually see the tail of the beastie in the reference and I didn't draw it on the page, so I added it in Photoshop after I scanned it because I thought the drawing looked odd without it. I like the dynamism of this image:

Enjoy.

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Beware the Jub Jub Bird...

Some more creatures as this project grinds toward its end. I'll have a couple of more creature posts in the next day or three. The image at the head of this post is a winged carnosaur. Fanciful. In the game, it's called a Jabberwock, which I guess I can see. Fun to draw in any event.

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.

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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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.

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.

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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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.

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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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.

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.

Process

Here's another drawing for my current RPG commission. I thought I'd throw in a work in process scan to give you an idea of how I go about making pictures. I drew this in pencil on a piece of bristol board. Mostly, I just blocked in the shapes and tried to get the anatomy of the beastie right. I don't start thinking about details until I start inking. In this case, this critter was described as a chameleon, able to change colors like an octopus, and in the game it's practically invisible. This is not easy to draw, and I haven't managed it, really. Black and white isn't really conducive to this, but it did give me the idea for the skin patterns while hiding in tall grasses. I ink with a brush these days, which is still kind of amazing to me. Inking with a brush used to seem like voodoo to me, particularly when I would look at people like Berni Wrightson (who drew his astonishing Frankenstein illustrations with a brush). Necessity drove me to brushes rather than the crowquills I used to favor and now I'm completely comfortable with them. Practice makes perfect, I guess.


Anyway, this was fun.

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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.

Feathered Dinosaurs

These are a couple of illustrations for a role-playing game. The brief on these describes newly-discovered feathered dinosaurs. I love drawing dinosaurs. I kind of love drawing birds. Creating creatures that are an amalgam? Ooooh yeah...

Mind you, the ten year-old me would have pitched a fit because I was "doing it wrong," but I remember reading Julian May's Warm Blooded Dinosaurs sometime in the early eighties which disabused me of my King Kong-influenced prejudices. In any event, these are almost purely brush and ink. Sume-e ink on plate-finish 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 if you'd like to support Krell Laboratories and Christianne's Art and Comics, please come on over and pledge. Thanks.