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......

Innistrad Concept Drawings pt1

Hope you're not yet sick of Innistrad posts - because I still have more to show!  I think I linked to some of the concept art I did for Innistrad before.  Much of that was probably pencil drawings with some digital color plopped on.  Here are a few of my pencil-only contributions of the work Mike "Daarken" Lim, Steve Belledin, Richard Whitters, and I did in concepting the Magic: The Gathering world of Innistrad.

Above are some samples of humans.  They hold no high status in this world - they are essentially the part of the populace constantly at odds with the rest of the denizens of Innistrad.  They are the prey species - the wildebeests, if you will.  But they aren't push overs.  However crude and utilitarian their clothes, armor, and weapons are, they've got spirit!

Oh man, working on the blue-aligned alchemist humans were fun! I unfortunately didn't get a chance to do up one in a final illustration but at least I got to dabble a bit at this stage.

The vampires are the uppity, fancy-clothes-wearing, nobility of the realm.  One of their unifying visual cues was wrought iron design work and filigree worked into both clothing and weapons.

Here's another vampy dame - a cleric.  probably blessing a keg of blood at a sweet vampire frat-party.

If you dig this Innistrad stuff, be sure to slide your internet butt on over to my Art-Blog and see some of the fully painted work I did for set.  Fun stuff indeed!

Ghoulraiser

This is a sketch I did for the Magic: The Gathering card "Ghoulraiser" for the freshly released gothic-horror set: Innistrad.

There's nothing particularly fresh about this scene. Just your ordinary zombie-with-a-shovel helping his pals out of the dirt to go clubbing. But, along with the previously posted "Daybreak Archer", it's one of the few preliminary drawings I have done lately that is a little bit more refined than a thumbnail. The other preliminary drawings I have done for this set were fairly loose thumbnail sketches that I took straight to the paints. That sort of approach is not my usual process but this particular set called for more attention to composition, mood, and atmosphere more than details. Which was a fun departure for the most part.

Daybreak Archer Sketch

This is the rough drawing I did for what became "Daybreak Archer" for Magic: The Gathering. It was drawn smaller than I usually do when I'm trying to work out a composition for a painting but sometimes that helps. If things aren't working right in the drawing phase, I'll switch sizes to get a different look. Usually I go down in size since the images for Magic are only a couple inches wide in the end product anyway. Plus, going down in size will simplify shapes and it ends up making it easier to piece together something that works. That's what happened here (though this isn't quite "thumbnail" in size - it's about 6 inches wide I think).

On occasion I will ditch the thumbnails and jump into drawing out an image at full size or nearly full size. For me sometimes the little rough thumbnails aren't helping and I need bigger pieces and some important details put in before I can "see" where it's going. When that happens, it is usually because I feel a certain facial expression (or a similar "mood" detail) is the key to the whole image. If I can just nail down the right face, I can piece in everything else.

What's that you ask? Was there a background for this piece or was the mysterious bow-gunner just on a field of white? She's in a forest - the trees were added much later in the process and so never were part of the original drawing.