NAME THAT ALBUM COVER!

Here it is, folks! The "Name That Album Cover" contest you've been neglecting your personal hygiene for! Be the first to "comment" the correct album title and band(artist) name for all ten and win the delightful prize bundle pictured at the bottom of this post. And also bask in the glory of winning a contest for which you successfully employed your nearly useless knowledge of album cover imagery. Bravo!

The drawings are listed from ONE (first) to TEN (last) so make your list accordingly when you submit it. There should be no need to make a random guess here - I picked albums based on the uniqueness of the cover image - thus so there is no doubt when you put the drawing and the original cover side by side. If you're uncertain, why, you're already on the internet - you can find out if you're right in like, two seconds.

Good luck!

The reward for completing this inane little exercise in album cover imagery recognition is quite the treat (unless you hate my artwork, then it probably is tantamount to getting kicked in the groin).  What you get is a copy of my book AGGREGATE with a personalized sketch on the inside - an 8.5x11 print of my cover artwork for the D&D book: Dragonborn - and, to sweeten the deal, an original painting from 2004 of an Eberron hobgoblin skulking about in his crazy get-up!  Pretty nice, eh?  Now go name those albums!

COMING SOON! NAME THAT ALBUM COVER CONTEST 2!!!

Some of you may recall my "Name That Album Cover" contest I had back in the Spring of 2011.  Some of you might be virgins to this. If you're unfamiliar, check out that hyperlink above - otherwise, here's the gist:

I have taken 10 album cover images and done a whimsical re-imagining as a pencil drawing.  These pencil drawings will be tributes to the original album covers but will not be exact representations - I'll have trimmed them down and put my own personal skew onto them in varying degrees but there'll be no doubt that they are a pencilly homage to their real counterpart.

In order to win the contest, you will have to be the first to name all ten albums (and the bands/artists, too!).  The first person to list all ten in the "comments" column will win the contest and reap the sweet prize.

To answer your skepticism, none of the albums are mega-obscure bootlegs or German imports or anything like that - but they're not anything as immediately and universally recognizable as "Abbey Road" or "Thriller" or anything by Christian-metal supergroup Stryper either. You may get some right away but have to get an audiophile pal to help you out on others (I don't want this to be TOO easy!). 

That said, my first contest was won in about an hour so I have cast out the net for album cover images a little further this time.  If it looks like everyone is stumped, I'll start dropping hints - but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

What is the prize, you ask? A signed copy of my art book: AGGREGATE with a personalized drawing of your choice on the inside - and a signed print as yet to be determined.

Ok, so there's that. The Draw-Blogified album tributes will be posted at high noon (that's 12:00pm eastern time zone) next Wednesday October 24th and the contest will begin!  Until then, start thumbing through your 8-track, vinyl, cassette tape, and CD collections to get your juices flowin'!

Rousing Return to Ravnica Roughs Reach your Retina!

Here are two pencil drawings that became paintings for the first salvo of cards in the Return to Ravnica Magic:The Gathering block.  This first one is called "Hellhole Flailer" - a fitting name for a creepy-ass ogre covered in needly spikes and, well, flailing chains all about.  And, as you can see by jumping over to my ART BLOG, this dude probably DOES live in a Hellhole of some sort.  Or at least it is where he is currently employed.  "Looking to hire large-framed person to wear S&M harlequin outfit and flail chains.  Must be devoid of empathy."

This other one is a soldier token card.  It accompanies the card "Precinct Captain" - both final paintings you can see at THIS LINK. As you'll notice with your astute eyeballing, the tough-as-nails soldier can be seen in the background of Precinct Captain as can the captain be seen standing in the shadows here on the soldier card.  Not really much otherwise to say about it - I just like the drawing of this woman and her keen Ravnican gladius.

On another note, I'm not going to just make this the site where I post the pencil roughs while posting the final art on a separate blog.  I like having the two relate directly from time to time but mostly I just like the idea of this DrawBlog being only about pencil drawings and sketches while the Art Blog encompasses everything else.  Eventually, one or the other will merge into a new Steve Prescott website, but let's face it, I haven't attended to my website in nearly an epoch - and right now, that project is still sitting cold on the back burner.  My last active move on the website front was to purchase the domain "steveprescott.com" which suddenly became available!  Then I went back to painting...

Innistrad Concept Drawings pt2

One last post of Innistrad stuff.  Wish I had more (since I probably did at least 50 more drawings for this concept push) but currently, this is all I have in my possession to show.  These here are my werewolf designs.  There isn't a whole lot left to do with werewolves unless you want to get really wacky.  For Innistrad though, werewolves had to remain within a classic look.  So I took a werewolf I might draw for White Wolf's Werewolf:the Apocalypse game but hyper exaggerated the proportions.  Instead of sleek and super-muscles all over, these werewolves have smaller heads, elongated arms, tiny waists and hind legs, and smaller thumbs higher up on the wrist than a human hand (right about the middle between a human hand and a canine front paw).  Females are more svelte of shoulder and chest. Thought they came out pretty cool.

Wolves in Innistrad are separate from the werewolves and thus did not have to look similar.  I threw out a bunch of little thumbnail to see what caught the eye of the design team.  the one that worked best was the hairless-muzzled one at the bottom. I tried to picture a classically "horror" version of a wolf and seemed to recall seeing an old old artist representation of a wolf attacking somebody and the wolf was truly monstrous (not the elegant, primal beauties they are in the real world).  The wolf in the picture had no fur on its face and exaggerated teeth.  So I kinda rolled with that: bare, bulkier muzzle brimming with long teeth, and a nose that was more like a weird bear than a canine.

Here's another take on what humans might wear to battle in Innistrad.  Black iron being the metal most often used, I applied bits and pieces of spiked iron armor to their otherwise leather and cloth outfits.  Gotta protect the neck from those damn vampires (thus the high collars!)

Well, that closes the book on the Innistrad stuff I currently have access to.  One day I'll have the rest of the work I did on this concept design project and I'll post some more.  For now though, I next will move on to posting some Return to Ravnica sketches - and then another "Guess the Album Cover" contest!  Stay tuned......