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......

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!

Sexy Treestump Attire on sale at Kohl's!

Want to wear a little something special for your special someone tonight?  Try a boiled leather thong bikini with metal and demon-horn trim, a mystical floor length half-skirt, bark-textured thigh-high stockings with 23-lb shit-kicker boots, boiled leather vambraces with rune relief antique gold trim, and to top it all off, magical glowing tree stump pouldrons!  All on sale NOW through Sunday at Kohl's!

Accessories also available.

Goblin Banana Hammock

Here's a goblin crotch-shot!  Because, ya know, I figured your day wouldn't be complete without getting an eyeful of goblin crotch.  Actually, I had to make sure that was less of a focal point in the final.  I added some leather straps to kinda break that little area up so that the card didn't have to be renamed "Goblin Banana-Hammock".

Oh, and make sure you check out my new "Art Blog".  I have posted a a bunch of my work for Magic: The Gathering's Innistrad expansion set and still have more to share!

Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix Columbus Ohio!

Here's a rough sketch for "Zealous Conscripts" - posted to give me reason to mention the following:

For any of y'alls that have interest, you probably know about this already but next weekend (July 20, 21, 22) I will be attending the Magic Grand Prix in Columbus, Ohio as a guest artist along with Steve Belledin.  It's your chance to get cards signed by two Magic artists named Steve in one Magic event!  Ya just can't pass that up, no sir.  How can you go to your grave knowing you missed out on double-Steve card signing action?  You can't, so be there!

The event is at the Columbus Convention Center - we're scheduled to sign all three days.  Both of us will be selling artist proofs, prints, original paintings, books, and, of course, convention sketches.  We might even sell locks of our hair braided together into bracelets complete with friendship beads!  Anything goes!!!

One last thing that has nothing to do with the above information - be sure to check out my Art Blog - different from this here "Draw" Blog in that it pretty much encompasses everything else of mine outside of the world of pencil drawings.  The latest post is about some tattoo art that has my fingerprints all over them.