Roon of the Hidden Realm

This is the rough for "Roon of the Hidden Realm" for Magic: the Gathering. Many of my drawings that are on the way to being paintings become a patchwork of adjustments and multiple pieces of drawings - stitched together in good ol' photoshop. This is because I tend to "feel" out a drawing as I am drawing it.  I'll start with the main focus which is usually a single figure or two figures - if I can get the feel and action of that to look right, I'll start to build off and around that.

On a drawing like this one for Roon, I'll start in a large sketchbook.  In feeling out the pose and action, I often run out of room to finish the drawing so I'll scan what I have, print that out as a slightly smaller version, then finish the drawing out to roughly the appropriate size ratio with background and everything.

Then BACK to the scanner and back into photoshop where I deliberate placement and proportions, etc.  Sometimes looking at the image on a computer screen helps me see little things that need to be tweaked - I'll adjust the size of a figure in the background or maybe bump the horizon line a tad - rotate a weapon a smidge so it isn't interfering with some other component of the composition - and so on.  In the case of Roon, I did a little of all these things.  I played around with whether I wanted Roon to be bigger or smaller in the frame according to how much of his whacky staff was going to be cropped off at the top and adjusted the building behind him this way and that to get it to feel right in the composition - all in hopes that I can get it all into a good, well-reading balance that makes for a potentially exciting painting.

You can see the final painting HERE on my art blog.

Oh, and the final painting is up for auction on Ebay through January 13th. Feel like owning a nice piece of original Magic artwork? Check it out HERE.

Planeswalker Sketch Crds

I just posted five new auctions selling a full set of the SDCC Variant Planeswalkers plus one original sketch card featuring one of the featured Planeswalkers. You have until about 10:00 am eastern time zone next thursday to make your bid if you're interested!

Lilliana
Ajani
Garruk
Jace
Chandra

Here are what the sketch cards look like. I did these drawings on blank cards and adhered them to a valueless old magic card so that they could have that nice iconic Magic the Gathering backing - makes it look pretty nice. Don't try to peel the cards apart to see what card I glued to - it's not a Black Lotus, for cryin' out loud!

By the way, for those of you interested in purchasing original Magic: The Gathering artwork, I have posted a price list of my available Magic originals HERE.

Jack Plane

I haven't posted any pencil stuff in a while so here's a little sumthin sumthin just to break the silence.  This was drawn just this week for a friend who is devilishly keen with carpentry stuff.

Eberron Revisited! (Kind of)

Hey, remember Eberron? It's still close to my hear because I was one of the concept artists that helped give visual cues to all the cool stuff found in the D&D off-shoot. I did a lot of interior art specific to the various Eberron books that came out in the mid-aughties - many of which I unearthed in my studio during my latest clean-up and containment surge.

This isn't a revisit to Eberron where I post a bunch of Eberron drawings so much as a ham-fisted attempt to get some of you Eberron fans out there to buy this old artwork I found and give it a better place to while away the rest of eternity than a shabby box in my studio.

Over on my Art-Blog I have posted a bunch of these old Eberron pieces including an epic panoramic cover painting of the dragon continent of Argonessen done for the Eberron book: Dragons of Eberron.

Any purchases over $300 also get an original Eberron-specific drawing such as the one at the top of this post!  Contact me at: steve2@rottface.com with any interest or questions!

AUTUMN NEARS!

Fall is almost here and for the sake of this draw-blog post, that means two things!  Football and ILLUXCON!!!!

Firstly, here's a sketch of a beefy football player.  The Cleveland Browns are my team so this here's a Cleveland Brown.  That said, you can rest assured that he is about to fumble (which will be returned for a touchdown) and that he will also probably have a season-ending injury.

But anyway, yeah - football is upon us.  I like football but I'm not a fan of things that signify the end of Summer.  I like Summer. This Summer especially has been a delight.  But oh well, guess it's time to grimace and watch my favorite tomato can humiliate northeast Ohio again.

Now, Illuxcon.  Never will you be able to see so much glorious traditional fantasy artwork in one spot at one time.  It's a annual fantasy art convention where a phenomenal crop of contemporary fantasy artists all set up and show off some truly masterful artwork.  For yours truly, it's always a humble-fest.  I go there every year and consider myself very fortunate to be among such great artists. Often times I wonder if there was some clerical error that got me into the show!

This year, Illuxcon has been moved from its usual November slot to September 11-15.  And it's also been moved from it's comfortable confines of Altoona to a new city further east - Allentown, PA.  This should be very exciting for everyone - I know I am damn excited.  And nervous!  And ill prepared!

A few things.  Illuxcon is split into three "shows".  There's a Main Show that goes on all five days.  There's a "Weekend Salon" that is just the two weekend days - and an evening showcase that is thursday and friday nights.  I am part of the Weekend Salon so I'll only be set up for all day Saturday and all day Sunday.  But don't let that deter you from enjoying all the IlluxCon has to offer for all five days!

Lastly, I did an interview with "Hipsters of the Coast"at a recent Magic: The Gathering GP.  Mind you, it has been word-for-word transcribed including all the "ums" and "uhs" and broken sentences I tend to use when I'm blathering on and distracted by answering questions in a bustling convention hall while signing cards. It makes it a bit of an awkward read and my short answers make me seem like a big jerk. Maybe I am a big jerk but I promise I wasn't trying to be on this particular day!  Anyway, there's some insight in the interview and I talk about my most sucktacular Magic card, too.  If you're into transcribed interviews with distracted, nonsensical fantasy artists, this is right up your alley!

Damn Dirty Apes

Just thought I'd post a little something since, ya know, I haven't posted much of anything in quite a bit.  This is the sketch for a painting that never came to fruition.  It is actually the precursor to my illustration for the Philadelphia Magic GP playmat (the one with the three-headed chicken monster).  This was my first idea but it was deemed not zany, crazy, or whacky enough.

It will probably never become a painting but it was a fun idea that kind of took shape while I drew it.  I started with the vague idea of apes in fantasy regalia.  But when I drew it, I liked the vapid/dejected look of the gibbon so much that I decided that he would be the catalyst.  In his hand is not a banana (as originally drawn) but a banana-like tooth from the water beast on the right.  See the little bloody hole in its gum line? The idea being that the banana-hungry gibbon saw the teeth and just had to have one - much to the discomfort and rage of the water beast.

PLANESWALKERS

So this week MTV Geek posted a teaser for the Magic: the Gathering promo Planeswalker cards that I was lucky enough to get to do the artwork for.  The five super-rare cards are to be unleashed to the slavering Magic fans at San Diego ComicCon this July.  The teaser showed the Garruk black-on-black promo card as an example of the nifty graphic quality of the cards - completely different from what one normally sees on a Magic card.

Despite the extremely graphic pos-neg quality of the artwork, I did do these traditionally (well MOSTLY traditionally - there was a bit of digital tweaking and cleaning-up that went on after I scanned them in). As such, there was just as much preliminary work and post work as there would have been had I just been painting these, believe it or not.  I had to plan them out as black and white graphics - establishing bold shapes and elements while letting go of lines and halftones to describe the forms and details.  It was most definitely a "less-is-more" approach - a different and challenging way of creating an image that I wasn't used to but welcomed never-the-less.

But before that, I had to draw up the right poses for each planeswalker and still establish them as drawings first - with all the appropriate details even though most of those details would get dropped out or covered up. So here's my preliminary work on Garruk as well as Jace.  As far as I know, an image for Jace's card hasn't been released yet but the same image is being used on t-shirts that are being sold at WalMart right now - some I'm thinking it is ok to show the sketch here.

One last thing, there has been a bushel of inquiries about purchasing the original artwork for these planeswalker pieces (apparently, non-digital planeswalker art is hard to come by!). That said, I'm going to be selling all five together in an auction on eBay in the coming month.  Don't worry, I'll post details about that when the time comes so, if you're interested, stay tuned!