Character Design

I find character design one of my most favorite part of making fantasy art. The genre allows for so much customization that an artist is allowed to let their imagination run wild with possible accessories and accoutrement.

Sometimes I have very little descriptions of the character to go on for a commission, and honestly too little is oftentimes more helpful than too much, as it allows me to design a character from the ground up. Take this description I was given for a Female Half Elf Barbarian. "She is about 5'4'', light skin with long braided hair. She travelled with a tribe of shaman that have the wolf as their spirit animal, so she wears pelts and things like that. Her weapons at the moment are a brass knuckle that she made and a wolfs claw fashioned onto a leather glove as a broad claw type weapon. "

This is a great description as it tells me a lot about the character but allows me to run wild with possibilities. This is the portrait I made from that description.

This character is sexy and sleek but is still very much a barbarian.

Here is another great character description. "115y/o Wood Elf Druid, 5'8", 115lb, hazel eyes, copper-tan skin, dark brown hair (almost black), leather armor, quarterstaff, raven scull work on a bit of leather around the neck (druidic focus), badger pelt worked into the armor/weapon if possible."

Here is the portrait.

And another "He's a blue Dragonborn Tempest Cleric of Talos, with lightning etched plate armor. Currently rocking the sword and board. I just like the Lightning theme of the character between his powers and breath weapon. Unlike your normal Dragonborn he has a tail."

This is the character portrait that has gotten the most attention for me, in fact, if you Google Dragonborn Cleric this portrait is the top image. I'm number 1! 

So remember, if you're ever commissioning artwork, live your artist lots of room to play around with. You'll get better artwork.

Here is a bit of my sequential comic book artwork.

The cover for issue 1of The Signal.

Here are some of the interior pages.

Some other works.

Commissions; Revisited.

So we left off with me waiting to see if the client wanted me to finish painting the sketch. He did. I  Did. He paid. Happy ending. But the story gets better. He wants me to draw a tavern scene of his entire D&D party so it's another job! Yay! Well without further ado here is the finished Firbolg Cleric of Silvanus.

Commissions

Getting paid to do art is hard. I'm pretty good at illustrating, yet I'm horrible at making money doing it for some reason. I have sent off my strongest work to many, many publishers, game companies, comic book publishers, and I've never even gotten a response. Not a "no thanks", or an "Are you serious". Nothing. Crickets. I'm alway hoping to hear something back like a "Hey, we're not looking for artists right now but keep trying" or even a "hey your art's good but you need to work on these areas..." So getting employment as an artist seems to be a non-starter. Making my name as a freelance seems to be my path, but even that is a road into the the desert. People who want to commission a piece of fantasy art are people simply looking for a character portrait. And no regular Joe or Jill wants to shell out a living wage for a piece of art that I will spend a whole day on, maybe more. So am I to work for $20-$40 per day? If I can even find someone who wants a piece of art?

This is a pice that I've started and I'm currently waiting to see if the person wants to pay me to finish it. I found the description of their character in a forum post where people look for artists, and this was a post offering money, yet it didn't say how much. So here I sit. 

Ok, it's the next day and I have heard back from the client. He wants the portrait finished and we worked out a one hundred dollar price. I'm happy to have the money but I'll end up getting about eight or nine bucks an hour for the job because I'll put in a lot of time doing detail to make it awesome. 

I'll post the finished piece when I'm done with it. 

Analog vs Digital

When I was growing up there was only one option for creating art, and that was by applying some type of physical medium to some type of physical canvas. Being a poor kid, my most readily available options were #2 pencils on notebook or printer paper. It wasn't until only a few years ago that I began using the digital medium to create art. I have grown so much in that time, much more than I ever did with pencils and paper. Here is an example of a piece of artwork from an old sketchbook from before I discovered playing with digital art.

This piece was done with pencils and gone over with a fine tipped ball-point pen. We can talk about the content of this piece in another blog entry, as I'm sure theres a lot to say about it, but I want to talk about the medium this go-around. Now to be clear this is a photo taken with my cell phone, cropped, and the  levels adjusted in photoshop. So, even this isn't truly completely analog.  I was just trying to get it to look as closely as it does in my sketchbook. 

      The best part about viewing an analog piece of art is its three dementionality. No piece of physical art is truly 2D, as a piece of paper though shallow has depth, and graphite, ink, and paint are laid on the surface in layers that add more depth no matter how thinly they are applied. When holding this piece in your hands, you can see the grooves from the pencils and pens. You can make out the difference in thickness of ink as it shimmers slightly in the light. There is a warmth in the the overall experience that is lacking in digital art, to steal a term you hear so much about in difference between vinyl and digital music. There really is a connection to its artifice that isn't present in a digital version. I use the term artifice (as in artificial) not as a way to say that it's fake, but that it is truly man-made, whereas digital, though still man-made, feels less like an artifact. 

      So why create art in a digital medium at all? Well, for the same reason to create or listen to music digitally, or to make or view films digitally. What they lack in artificiality they make up for in ease of use and distribution. The easy to use aspect allows one to explore artistically in ways that physical mediums do not. When drawing with pencil and paper I am always much more cautious as to what I try to draw. This is because there is a cost to failure. Erase too many times and the paper is ruined. Ruin too much paper and you're out of paper. But with digital formats those limits don't exist. Therefore the caution ceases and one is free to explore the depths of their imagination. 

      I started using digital as a way to supplement my pencil and ink drawings. So I would draw with pencil and ink, then I'd scan the image and color it inside photoshop. The problem with this was that I was still limited by my caution, but it did open me up to learning the digital medium. 

This is my earliest foray into coloring my art digitally. Though I liked the look of the finished piece, I had such a hard time understanding how photoshop worked at the time that it was another 3 years or more until I revisited the digital medium. 

When I started learning Adobe After Effect, a motion graphics application, in film school. My professor did a basic demonstration in class on Photoshop so we could create or edit assets for After Effects manipulation. Learning the basics was all it took for me to try again at coloring my art digitally. The picture above was created specifically for something to color in PS. You can tell because there are no flames in the pencil and ink drawing but the guy's face is still melting off. 

This is the fully inked and scanned version.

   Coloring this digitally allowed me to explore in ways I would not have even tried had I have finished it in colored pencil or markers. Yet I still had a long ways to go before I would start creating in the digital medium completely.  I think the biggest reason it didn't happen right off the bat was because I was still using a mouse when coloring, as I didn't have a tablet and stylus yet. 

   I decided to get a Wacom Bamboo Fun to try and draw digitally but that ended poorly. I didn't take into account the way my brain was trained to work. I could easily manipulate a mouse and look at the screen, but when I tried using what's basically a digital pencil, my hand eye coordination was all messed up. I had drawn my whole life looking down at the paper when drawing with a pencil so when I tried drawing with the Wacom tablet it just didn't work with me trying to look up at the screen. I shelved the little bamboo fun for about another year or so. 

   After that I started working on a project with my friends at Mazith to bring table top RPG game books to print. I began working on multiple pieces a week and my wrist began to hurt from coloring so much with a mouse. I brought out the Wacom tablet again and forced myself to learn how to use it. It didn't take very long. Thats when the door to digital art really opened for me. 

This is a creature called a Raznib. It's a very early piece that I drew on paper then colored digitally. 

It's stiff, the colors seem to clash probably because the character is too saturated. But here is another Raznib after I had been working with the tablet awhile but it was still drawn on paper and colored in Photoshop. 

Much better right? Not as stiff and he has a much better wardrobe. But here is my latest Raznib With an elf type dude. 

    So digital art is still something I'm exploring and growing with and that's what it's great at, even if there's a little warmth lost. 

Introduction

I can't remember a time in my life when fantasy art wasn't a passion. I grew up in the 80's and 90's and finding fantasy art wasn't as easy as logging onto Deviant Art or Reddit. I was born to biker tattoo artists, so from my earliest days there was always crazy art around. My parent's shop and even our home was covered in those old black and white Spaulding & Roger's tattoo flash pages that were mostly hand colored by my parents.

A page of flash sheets from the Spaulding & Roger's catalog

Dragons, vikings, naked women, swords, panthers filled my peripheral vision at all times leading my imaginary world to be filled with these same visions. My mother and father would even sit and draw with us children. Art for me was always a rewarding endeavor.

Earliest art of mine that I have. I was about 10 when I drew this. 

As a small child my entertainment consumption was dominated by the little blue mushroom people called the Smurfs. They were plagued by the nefarious black wizard Gargamel. This led me to the world of  Eternia which was pitched in a war of good and evil between the hero HE-MAN and his arch nemesis Skellitor. He-Man and Skellitor were images direct from the tattoo flash put into motion. The violence and bulging muscles and bursting bodices of this slightly more more adult cartoon entranced me and expanded the worlds of my own imagination.

Upon learning to read, I soon found comic books to be another avenue of escapism that led me to ponder the moral dilemmas posed by the books. But it also introduced me to the names of the artists in a way that cartoons never did. Knowing an artist and their work made the work itself much more intimate and resounding. Those people made that artwork for me personally. I was their target demographic. Jim Lee, Barry Windsor-Smith, Dale Keown, Larry Stroman, Ron Lim fed my hunger for comic art.

Mainstream comics soon led me to the fringes of the medium. Heavy Metal magazine became a central hub for finding great art and artists. I soon found Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy novels. The artwork on those books led me to artist like Brom, Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell and Luis Royo and many others.

My life has been filled with amazing adventures not only through imaginative fantasy, but that is the area this blog will focus on. More art to come soon.