The Elderlimb!

This is the drawing for what would become "Elderlimb" for set 17 of the World of Warcraft TCG.  Treants, treefolk, tree-people, whatever they are, they're always fun to draw.  Always.  Should there ever be a day when it is no longer fun to draw anthropomorphized trees, that will be the day I hang it up.  And then probably hang myself since, obviously, I have been taken over by nano-parasites and therefore have become a threat to humanity.

Be that as it may, I had fun with the tree guy and the painting didn't come out half bad either.  As with most Warcraft art, I got to muck around with gaudy colors and see what happens.  Go take a look at the final piece on my draw-blog's sister site: Prescott Art Blog for an eyeful!

Also, because I have to drop tiny little reminders every once in a while, if you're new to this site and/or new to my pencil drawings and you like what you see, perhaps your interest would propel you to buy one of my books: AGGREGATE: The Art of Steve Prescott.  Contact me at steve2@rottface.com if you're interested!

SALVAGE

 Here is a very mildly interesting post about half-assed problem solving!

For this Magic:The Gathering card (titled "Silent Blade Oni"), I was to simply draw a cool-looking demon-ninja creature on a rooftop at night.  The drawing at the top is what I squeezed out - a pretty fun little piece with some cool details and I thought the angle worked really well.  Unfortunately, coincidentally, and almost creepily odd, the pose, angle, and composition were all but exactly the same as a sketch for a different card by a different artist which was turned in and approved before I sent in mine for approval!  Seriously, the similarities were crazy.  Anyhoos, the other dude's sketch had already been approved so my art director had no choice but to ask me to change the angle or the pose or both. 

While I won't hesitate to erase a drawing if I have an inkling of doubt about whether it works well, this was different in that I was pretty invested in the drawing.  I liked it.  I was already picturing how I was going to color and paint it.  So I went about finding a way to salvage as much of what I liked as I could in order to separate it from that other illustration.   First I flipped it horizontal-like.  Then I tilted the camera-angle which really shouldn't have worked on the figure at all if you think about it - but somehow it did (which I'm not sure says anything very good about my drawing here!).   I then redrew everything else around the figure.  And that is how you do shit.

The final piece ended up looking like THIS - though not quite as dark as it looks here.

Jabberwocky!

As a favor for a friend, I drew up my own version of a Jabberwock from the famous poem made up of gibberish words.  I can't recall when I last read that poem - perhaps I never even have read it until recently - but I always thought I had an idea of what a Jaberwock looked like.  Turns out that my preconceived notions were all based on the original accompanying illustration - but the poem itself is exceptionally vague about what a Jabberwock looks like stating basically that it flits around in the trees, has claws and teeth.  Obviously, that leaves it wide open for interpretation.  I was going to go for a scarier, creepier look for this thing but, with a name like Jabberwock, I figure it had to be at least a little more "weird" than "creepy".  So anyways, there ya go.