Fortunately, I found an employer in what is now Kru Interactive. At the time, it was the very small first attempt for Korean developer Nexon in establishing an American beachhead. There were maybe 10 employees total when I was hired. Nexon had some decent success in South Korea already, and would go on after this period to have a lot of success worldwide. But this period was tough for them to find their footing in the west. There’ll be more on that.

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I no longer remember the contents of the retelling of the story as it appeared in the magazine, and have not read the original and ancient versions. My own exposure to Greek mythology was largely through film and, likewise, retellings of the stories in school similar to this when I was growing up. A couple of Greek plays in High School.

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As I’ve said before, my goal with those painting retreats has been to work on non-commissioned works there, and that year was no different. I was once again behind the ball heading in. The year before, I barely managed to get it together to begin working on “Glossai Pyros.” 2015 was no different as the retreat began the very day following IlluXCon, which itself had begun just a few days after showing at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, where I had my Hearts for Hardware work on the road. Whew!

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At left is a painting I did on a Boggart Bog artist proof (9/50, non-foil) which I’ll be using for a printed Plant 0/1 token, rendered in oil over acrylic. The plant pre-painted artist proof is available for purchase here.

At right is a Sword of Hearth and Home x Hatsune Miku crossover, by request, in acrylic. Not my usual thing, but was interesting to try that anime style.

APRIL COMMISSIONS
There were no March commissions, remember that I do not open new commissions until prior ones are completed. I will not take new orders while sitting on old ones!

Painted commissions are rendered in acrylic and/or oil paint on surfaces prepared to accept paint, and varnished using the same materials as for my finished illustrations. Borders are preserved around the image, unprimed, to verify the card was unprinted on back.

You may mail in your already-purchased card when you secure a slot. Let me know on checkout and I’ll provide an address. Please put it in the mail promptly to keep the schedule flowing!

Otherwise, if you secure a commission, you should then go back and purchase the proof you’d like art on, and let me know in the comments on checkout (this will save you time in trying to grab a commission).

Commissions are completed before the next month’s go live.

You can find the full inventory of artist proof cards here.

The public commissions this month are two painted proof and have sold.

Paid subscribers have access to two one black-and-white commissions, below. Upgrade your free subscription for a little as $5.99 to gain access to these and more. These are now sold out, but sign up so you don’t miss them next time.

The plant pre-painted artist proof is available for purchase here.

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For awhile, this dragon existed painted on just a gray field background. I had painted it in monochrome for use in another project, and then left it sitting around. I scanned the painting in, digitally colored and tweaked it, and put it together with a digital background and it served its purpose, but the painting served no greater use after that.

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The reason I went the digital grayscale route was for time’s sake. I spent years doing my sketches in pencil--doing grayscale images in pencil takes a lot more time. But that’s the problem--in illustration, it’s very easy to get a system down for doing things, and to stick to it for so long that you can start to forget the other ways you can or used to do something. Years ago, I used charcoal more often. Primarily in college, but there were a number of studies and things done professionally, even some interior illustrations, which I rendered entirely in charcoal. The downside is storage--you have to be more careful storing charcoal drawings and handling them, since they smudge easier. That was the primary reason why I put them aside. Plus, early on in my career I did much quicker, sloppier sketches since they would be delivered low-res by fax.

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In 2011, Magic introduced double-faced cards in its Innistrad set, but the World of Warcraft game included these going back a few years earlier. My illustrations for the Raid Boss, Shazzrah, were of this form. I covered the big vertical full-length illustration previously.

Since these two illustrations were assigned at one time, I was able to keep them in context with each other. I actually wasn’t sure how exactly these were going to print. In fact, I think I thought one was on a smaller regular sized playing card—this one—owing to its standard proportions. And then I thought the vertical one was like a special oversized card or something separate from this. It’s funny sometimes how in the dark even illustrators can be about the projects they are on!

So in any case, the vertical illustration I decided was going to be the action shot, this one would be more character portrait than anything.

The workflow otherwise was identical, and along my then-standard format. The pencil drawing was produced, but in this case for some reason I don’t recall, I took my thumbnail—done using Painter IX’s rake and other ink tools—and made a more formalized value study from it, using non-blended digital ink tools. From there, I did the pencil drawing and then did the formal value study using it, which is the version I sent to my Art Director. I put them side-by-side here for comparison.

I think for this piece and a few others in that period, these were painted from a pad of ready-to-use canvas-textured paper. It was my first time working on that, and after doing a few pieces on it, it wasn’t a support I ever returned to again. I think the texture was a little too prominent and too regular, less canvas-like, actually, feeling more like a mesh.

I talked recently about, “The Five Year Plan,” for personal paintings’ average gestation. Indeed, the first record I have of this piece dates back to near my start, in 1996 when I produced a small acrylic value study.

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The original painting for Advanced Reconstruction is available in the shop.

My second of two Saga illustrations for Secrets of Strixhaven was a purely representational affair—there was no funny business with other materials as there was with Intermediate Chirography, previously discussed.

In this case, we are shown a stone tablet engraved and sculpted in low and medium relief. There are hints of parts of it having been painted in red, but it’s begun chipping off in places. Throughout art history, it was surprising to learn that many statues and such that we know as just made of stone, were actually painted, sometimes garishly so. The script carved in here is an in-world variety, but of course says nothing real.

Whereas the other illustration was sitting on a table with its deep wood grain, here I have this tablet resting on a smooth slate surface. And whereas these Saga artworks are of an unusual tall and thin size, I used the background surface in both cases as an excuse to extend the art sideways so as to make the original art a more frame-ready size for whoever the eventual owner of the painting might be.

In both of these Strixhaven illustrations, they were sent to Wizards of the Coast as digital preliminary images, using photo textures and such as stand-ins. You can see that the scroll the Orc is holding here, which unfurls into red magic, is very low relief, whereas in the final you can see it was carved deeper, as if you could put a finger behind it in the gap between it and the tablet itself. This was due to the influence of seeing some wonderful examples of medieval and similar European relief sculptures, which sometimes had a surprising amount of depth to them, versus some of the large bas-relief carvings one sees in ancient near-eastern civilizations, which tend to have a shallower profile.

It was of course tempting to take these digital starts and then just polish them up for final, versus starting from scratch again to make a physical artifact.

I faxed over a rough pencil sketch with a horizontal illustration—the details about layout and such are long gone now.

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In the years I worked on D&D, it was a regular gig for me. The pay was largely horrible for the interior illustrations, especially for a painter in a time when digital tools were becoming prominent time-savers. But it did allow for different sized and proportioned images than Magic’s fairly consistent horizontal rectangle, would be viewed larger even in the smallest in-book reproduction, and at this time, still featured more traditional sword and sorcery imagery than Magic, which had long branched off into its own unique worldbuilding.

Owing to the pay, primarily, I tended to keep the paintings on the small side. This would grow frustrating over time, and I’d start to increase their size over my tenure on the game, starting with 4^th edition, which we began working on the following year.

I couldn’t tell you anything about this rat-boy character anymore, except that it was a lot of fun to work on the nasty, filthy, foamy water in this sewer.

The drawing is a little clearer in showing his long tail ducking in and out of the shallow water as it trails behind him. A hand peeks out of the water and given the depth of this slurry, one can only assume that it is not attached to its person.

D&D illustrations, especially these smaller ¼ and ½ page ones, often had far fewer thumbnails than their Magic or larger illustration cousins. Again, finding ways to economize. Although, the thumbnail/idea portion is arguably among the most important steps. Certainly a number of D&D illustrations I did—heck, any number of illustrations I did, generally—would have benefited greatly from even 4-5 thumbnails versus the 1-3 these small pieces usually entailed.

But in illustration, everything is among the most important steps: concepting, working out the drawing, referencing, value and/or color study, and final art execution.

A lot of the D&D pieces in this era were painted on Arches Hot Press Watercolor paper, treated usually with PVA size to accept oil paints. This saved me the time of mounting the paper to panel, and really up to about 11x14” the paper is just fine without further support. Starting at 12x16” the sheets risked beginning to buckle a little, but even 12x16” generally held up fine.

Whereas I often mask off the image area, for these the border of the image was indicated when I printed my drawing out, and I often just overpainted the margins, and assuming I didn’t obliterate the line so fully that I couldn’t find it, it was easy to take a blade and trim the excess off at the end, which I did. But in cases like this, that meant a little extra actual background went in the trash!

The theme here was simple, perhaps trite: mermaids. An image regarding one such got lodged in my head maybe 4-5 years prior. In 2006 while living for a bit in England, I began working on it.

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The original painting shown here can be purchased here

Limited edition reproductions can be found here

In the history of toys and video games, is there a product from the past so beloved years later, but which was played with less than R.O.B.?

It’s a well-told story how this toy robot, which would “play” games with you on the then-new NES, was essentially a trojan horse to get retailers to stock the game system at all, after the Great Video Game Crash of 1983 forced stores to deep-discount video games, making them think they were done with video games.

Sold in a deluxe bundle with the light gun and the console for a whole lot of money, it was quickly and quietly discontinued early in the system’s life, as soon as retailers and kids got excited for home video games again. Only two games were produced that worked with it, and there are no known prototypes of unreleased titles to make you think Nintendo even intended to support this beyond launch.

I didn’t know anyone who had one of these who used it beyond setting it up and trying it once or twice before just playing Gyromite using both controllers. As such, this thing sat in dusty corners of rooms, on bookshelves, and ended up more of a decorative item than anything. The Robotic Operating Buddy was the buddy a kid in the late 80s spent the least time with.

And yet, a lot of nostalgia has grown up around this little guy. His design is pretty spectacular, presaging robot designs in films like Short Circuit and Wall-E in popular culture, even if Tomy’s Omnibot 2000 likely served as a just slightly earlier inspiration.

R.O.B. was always going to be the most complicated object my Hearts for Hardware series would feature. The transparent controllers and things all run second. And yet, I’ve always looked forward to painting this, even as the unit I picked up has sat on a shelf behind me for years, true to form. It’s nice to close out the NES portion of this series with this piece.

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The original painting for Intermediate Chirography is available in the shop.

I’ve discussed previously the difficulties inherent in the Saga illustration format for Magic cards, but to recap: these are thin, tall illustrations that are supposed to portray an in-world artifact or artwork. So if this were a Saga including the cave paintings of Lascaux, I would have to draw people and animals as they appear in those prehistoric renditions. Of course, I think I can draw better than those folks, but let’s be fair: I don’t have to spend my days running down aurochs for food.

But it means I have to adopt a foreign or naive style for the sake of storytelling. So for Secrets of Strixhaven, I was given two Sagas to do.

Here, I was to show this Wizard casting spells and creating creatures from the ink-shaped writings of his weapon, which is a giant feathered quill of sorts. Above, inscrutable text perhaps explains the spell or includes instructions for its incantation. Behind the character there is a nib-shaped area of gold leaf, and the tip is punctuated with a wax seal featuring the Silverquill symbol for the College of Eloquence from the set’s world.

There were a couple places I could dig in and have fun more along my own interests, and these were in placing the item on a wood table, and in creating the ancient, weathered parchment.

These I rendered more meticulously in my usual style, adopting a more trompe l’oeil style, which would allow the art on the manuscript to appear even more like art applied to it. In retrospect, given the aging of the parchment, I probably should have taken an eraser to the “ink drawing” on it, to weather and fade it in places more!

For the wax seal at top, I decided it best to actually reference it rather than create it from my imagination. I printed out the symbol and just ordered a wax seal kit at the size I intended it to be, and pressed a wax seal using iridescent wax. This is now the second time I have ordered a wax seal for use in a Magic card illustration. Can you name the other?

The last challenge was with the genuine gold leaf I applied in the background, and which I used to stroke the calligraphy in the top half. Scanning gold leaf doesn’t look too great since it scans a uniform sheen. In person, the fun of leaf is that it reflects the light differently depending on angle, ambient light, and so on. So here I scanned the painting so the painted portions would look their best, and then shot a hi-resolution photo of the painting so I could adjust the lighting to reflect in the gold area. Then I combined these to make the final scan. But no one scan or photo of the original art is the right way, since it’s always variable in real-life.

I briefly considered actually applying the wax seal straight to the painting, which would create an actual 3d artifact. The issues were that this didn’t leave room for error (you can see an earlier, bad attempt in the photo), and there ran the risk of it cracking of chipping off the painting, or completely delaminating from it! Definitely would not want the latter, though I suppose some cracking or chipping could be considered in-character.

So instead, I simply used the photo as the reference to paint it in oils onto the art.

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It’s nice to theme these if I can. Recently I discussed my classic Magic illustration, Pacifism, in a public post. So here are some related sketches!

On these artist proof cards, I was asked to draw Urza in his armor. I always find it funny in recent years to do these one-take sketches that look better than the original illustration. The joys of improving.

It’s entirely possible, but I don’t remember, that the drawing on the right was done on another card, not Pacifism. Those old cards allowed very dark pencil marks (like at left) whereas newer ones are coated differently and tend to not allow such dark marks without preparing the surface. Which makes me think it was drawn on the back of something else, but by request still.

But I’ve painted Urza twice, more recently on the card Urza’s Incubator in which he appears many years later. And I’ve certainly been asked to draw or paint on those as well.

I don’t take card alter commissions often, though I posted some last couple of months. But in light of my Anachronism posts this week, here’s one where I was given a playing card and was asked to paint over border aspects and extend the art.

I spent some of 2005 living in Italy, in the Tuscany region. It was a good time in a tiny village, and I continued working on projects in my very small and makeshift studio, including working on the bulk of my illustrations for the Anachronism game.

These assignments were usually handed out in fives: a character, an artifact, and some narrative or other scenes related to the character. For this suite, my work covered Theodoric the Great—the Germanic rendering of the name appeared in the official title of the card.

An Ostrogoth, raised in Constantinople and made ruler of Italy during the tumultuous 5c., his was the way of the conquerer, and this was portrayed in his namesake illustration, wherein I once again decided to employ my practice of painting way beyond the border of the printed image for no other reason than that I wanted to. Most players of the game would not see the full image unless they saw me show it here and there over the years.

This was intended from the beginning, as seen in the thumbnail for this piece. Pieces of reference, including helmet, were surprisingly easy to find, I think I ran across this helmet at random while walking about Sienna or Florence and took some photos of it. It suffers from the survivorship bias of historical artifacts: likely there was decent variety among helmets, but what survives becomes thought to be something like industrially-produced and standard-issued.

In more recent years, I’ve often done my pencil studies in two steps. In the above pencil study, the figure was probably drawn too small for my needs, but as I was showing the whole environment, the only option would have been to draw on a much larger sheet so that the figure could be right-sized for the detail I wanted. These days, I would draw the figure at the size I need, more often than not, and would draw out the background separately, then composite them digitally for use in the painting. I also produced a color study of the environment versus a black-and-white value study. It serves as both, but evidently I needed to see my path forward in color more than usual. You’ll note that I just digitally inserted the sky I was using, from the bank of photos I’ve built up when randomly taking pictures while out and about. I had to then physically translate that photo to paint. Digitally, one might just mush it around a bit with painting tools to make it look less photo-like.

The values of a painting (it’s balance of lightness and darkness) are always more important than the colors, in my opinion. If you reduce a color piece to black-and-white you’re left with the values and if they hold together the painting will generally hold together. Conversely, if the value study is good you can paint it in almost any rational palette and it will still hold together. For instance, I could have used a strong golden palettehere , but by keeping with the value study the painting would still read nicely. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the value study and the final piece, reduced to value.

You can see that many things are exactly as planned. Other things were tweaked to improve readability—for instance, I pushed the further trees a bit back in the atmospheric perspective to give the piece a bit more depth.

For a couple of years I had the pleasure of working on the Anachronism game, which carried The History Channel’s license. I’m interested in history in general, and find it to be every bit as exotic and exciting as fantasy. Certainly, fantasy art would be much poorer if it didn’t draw so heavily from history itself.

For the 5th set, I chose to do some work within the Aztec culture, doing 5 pieces themed around Auitzotl, the great Aztec ruler and father of the more infamous Moctezuma. One of the five was a portrayal of a Chimalli, or type of aztec shield.

History buffs are probably tied with hard-core fantasy/science fiction fans for being eagle-eyed. Getting something wrong in either is bound to get you hogtied. This must be balanced against the constraints of illustration in general, namely, time. So work began with a lengthy all-in-one research session.

I researched the elements of all five illustrations at once. I paid particular attention in this case to illustrations rendered in various codices illustrated by the Spaniards in the 16th century. This is problematic for a few reasons, but the main reason for an illustrator is that the drawings made were often quite primitive. case in point:

Putting together the information gathered from various sources, and taking into account the occasional museum photo and some more modern portrayals of these things by other artists, I eventually had a good overview of the items I needed to illustrate, as well as knowledge of gaps I’d need to fill in as reasonably as possible. History is difficult for just this reason: we end up having a small selection of artifacts and often assume they are the only things that existed. Where the record is incomplete, an artist must extrapolate to some extent. This isn’t so much excuse-making as there were few places where this was necessary, but establishes the problem an illustrator faces when legitimate information fails to inform all the aspects required for the painting.

With history it’s important to have all the reference before you begin concepting, quite a reversal from fantasy and most other artwork where you normally conceive an image and then find relevant reference. This is because you don’t really know what needs to be portrayed until you’ve checked it out…and sometimes you’ll find requirements that you hadn’t imagined which can wreck a pre-conceived composition.

Chimalli represents what is now known as an “artifact” image among Magic artists: an image portraying a specific object, in this case, the shield. Some attempts at artifact images portray the object simply. Examples would be a sword on a rack, a book open on a table, and so on. I’ve used this approach myself in the past, particularly when asked specifically to do so. More often, I prefer to inject a human element into the piece—after all, objects are often used by people or in relation to people, and viewers react positively to seeing other people portrayed in art. So in this case rather than show a Chimali so up close that it took up the full frame, I went for the Chimali in use. Of course this necessitated researching the jaguar warrior who in this case would wield it, leaving double the room for being called on for errors, and double the research! Chimali, to my understanding, were used primarily for batting away arrows, not repelling blows the way metal shields might. However, I figured that eventually some arrows would stick, particularly because of how the Chimali is constructed. There was my concept, and it was ready to go.

Putting it all together I produced the following drawing, which I quite liked.

I scanned the drawing and popped open Painter. I made the drawing a ‘multiply’ layer and painted on a normal layer beneath it using a custom oil pastel brush that ended up most closely mimicking oil paints according to my style and usage. I quickly knocked in grayscale/value. I wanted the environment to be indistinct.

One reason I settled on tighter drawings is because it will often be the actual base for my painting. Typically this means printing out an enlarged version on the stock I will eventually paint on. I enlarge the drawing then use my printer to print it out, meaning I get to use the actual detailed drawing and yet preserve it separately rather than lose it forever under paint. I use only black ink for this purpose because the color inks are probably more fugitive and will fade away more over decades. I don’t print it very dark because I don’t want to use the blackness, I want to completely cover the ink with paint. Again, if I only lightly paint over black areas because they’re already so dark and then the ink fades away in 50 years, the painting is going to look terrible. Some newer printers use “archival” inks and I use these now but my habits haven’t changed as I don’t trust them, and neither will I live long enough to see how those inks hold up after a hundred years or so. So the drawing is printed lightly and is completely obliterated by full-coverage paint so that if the ink goes, nothing changes. I often use Ampersand Hardbord as my support. I wet-mounted my drawing to the board. Various artists use various adhesives but I have tended towards using PVA glue which is a lot like Elmer’s White Glue but fully archival where Elmer’s has some impurities in it. I then seal the paper and get painting. I’ll expand on more of these stages eventually.

But painting is the fun part. I enjoy the actual painting much more than any other step, including the drawing. Before beginning the jaguar suit I painted the spots darker so that they’d show through the fur as I painted it (as mentioned, the drawing wasn’t that dark and wouldn’t have survived the painted fur). I then went back and painted the spots over the homogenous handling of the fur in general. You can see that I re-painted the drawing on the shield too for the same reason—I wanted the details from the drawing to show through when I applied the major colors. I don’t always do that, as my techniques are a little fluid, and further explanation is probably in order since words do not easily convey the process, though a good painting teacher or book might be able to explain the methods for painting pattern and texture. You’ll note I changed the background from a sky that got lighter as it went down to one that got darker with more brightly lit ground. This was a fairly on-the-fly decision.

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Working on The Thief Who Stole Heaven was a non-stop sprint. Right toward the end of the sprint, the finish line in sight, I was asked if I could add one more spread to the book, for the dedication/copyright page. They wanted something fairly simple in this case.

My records tell me that on Dec. 10^th I turned in the last of the 18 2-page spreads that comprise the book. They would go to the author for any comments or revision requests. Apparently the next day, as I was turning my attention to outstanding revision requests, I received the request for this add-on.

I entered a second layer of panic as I hardly had time for the work that remained before we had to send the files to the printer. By lunch on the 11^th I sent them the top thumbnail here, a quiet image of an emptied cross, a shaft of light crossing the image.

As you can see, it is absolutely minimal. Probably the background would’ve just been gray clouds. I thought the split page composition allowed for two nice text blocks for the necessary typography. I think the idea was nixed just on not introducing this imagery at the front of the book, since it features prominently in the back third. Fair enough. I decided to send them the second thumbnail, a simple scene of Golgotha as a bright dawn breaks over it. I don’t see them there, but I think the intent was always to have the three crosses tiny on top.

Anyway, this was submitted on the 14^th after I’d heard back, and approved. The following morning I grabbed a sheet of the Arches Hot Press Watercolor Paper I had used for most of the book (from a 12x16” block), sized and primed in gray gesso, and got to work.

I had hastily sketched out some of the foreground elements in white pastel pencil and here I am using probably gesso white to begin to knock back the sky. You might ask why I started with a gray toned sheet versus default white, and that would be a fair question. It’s possible that I had extra primed sheets that weren’t used for whatever reason (the cover ended up being larger, and on illustration board, for instance). It’s also possible that I preferred knocking back the gray to white, thinking that the gray would help more in the shadowed hillside and for the clouds that remained.

Either way, by 10:15am on the 15^th I had taken the first photo, and continued in acrylic. An hour and a half later, I had completed the underpainting and sealed it to move to oils

My final scan is dated the following day, the 16^th, at 4:50pm. I think I completed this piece start to finish on the 15^th, as I was working very long, late days through the project. This allowed some drying time and for varnishing before getting the scan. That being the case, it’s a piece that I liked, done in a manic flurry of activity, operating more on instinct than planning.

The project essentially complete, I still had another week or so of revisions to work on before putting the project to bed, but the end was at least finally in sight.