...So at this stage in history, I think it is a crime to allow oneself to go ignorant of facts for very long when the Incredible Answer Machine is right at your fingertips. So, Krallen is deutsch for Claws. Don’t say I never taught you anything. Unless you’re German or speak German, in which case it’s possible I still may never have taught you anything. I’ll teach you something yet.

In the Grizzled Outcast post, I mentioned there were cues I needed to maintain from human-to-werewolves to make sure you knew who was who. One thing I decided to do was to spread the range of human types. The other thing I hinted at, but didn’t get to.

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JULY COMMISSIONS
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).

NEW: ALTERS!
I receive lots of requests for alters and figuring out the scope and cost for various tiers is more than I can deal with right now. So I will propose this. If anyone is interested in up to a full-card alter, this is essentially the same work as a painted artist proof: a full card’s worth. So, if you would like a full-front alter, I am making one available for paid subscribers to test the waters. If you want something less than a full alter, well if you’re willing to pay the full price, I’ll still do it. The only thing I will not do is float the image under the text. Either I’ll cover the textboxes or preserve the text/title/type boxes.

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

The public commission this month is one painted proof. SOLD

Paid subscribers have access to one black-and-white commission and one full alter, below. A paid subscription gets you access to these, the archives and unlocked posts every weekday.

EDIT: This month’s paid subscriber items are sold out.

Thank you for your paid subscription!
The black and white commission is here!

The alter commission is here!

The cards needed to each show a blue-aligned spell affecting red (mountain) in the case of Stare, and green (forest) in the case of Gaze. I decided a circle would be my tool for showing the effects, and for creating similar compositions. The circle would frame the figure in each piece in blue, and everything within would be tinted cool. In the case of Gaze, where the rocks/cliffs are touched by the apparently expanding blue aura, the rock disintegrates. In the case of stare, the plants wither.

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When beginning to work on the Star Wars RPG, I was a bit excited since Star Wars was a foundational influence on what would become my career. So it was a little anticlimactic to find that some of the work done for this game involved things that weren’t in the movies, or maybe didn’t exist yet. Sometimes they had appeared in comics or other media related to the franchise.

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When I received the assignment for this D&D book, it included an illustration of a pastoral fantasy landscape. I was living in Pienza, Italy, which overlooks the Val d’Orcia and well, I didn’t have to walk very far to take reference for this.

The scene here was so perfect that all I had to do was omit some farm houses that dot the valleys and then paint it. Since it is otherwise so literally that place, we’ve kept it as a record and memento of our time living there. Because I sourced the panel in Italy, it is in centimeters, so it is 7.87x15.75”. This has meant framing it has been a challenge and ironically it has gone unframed this whole time! I mean, all it takes is a custom frame, but I’m used to being able to order standard-sized ones, which was the whole reason I increasingly moved to standard-sized paintings!

While there, and before this assignment, I also did a plein air painting down there on the little path you can see.

Painting en plein air is quite a unique discipline. You show up and you might have scouted out the area first, and bring with you the barest of supplies. Ideally you’ll set up a bit early and have a little prep time to sketch out the scene. Then you wait a bit as you watch the sun slowly creep along the sky, observing the shadows being cast and the colors change until just that right moment...then it’s showtime. That right moment is typically going to be a little earlier than the time you wish to record for the simple reason that from the moment you start, you might have 2 hours, max, until the lighting changes so drastically that you will no longer be able to square what’s on your painting to what is in front of you and are forced to stop.

It’s a pretty hectic pace, and if you’re working at evening, a bit stressful (in a good way). I kept looking to my right, noting where the sun was. I had to beat it--it was on its way towards sinking behind some mountains and if it got there before I was done, I was going to be sunk as the lighting would instantly disappear. In this situation you have to make choices quickly, what you will show and what you won’t, the level of detail you’ll put here or there, when will you commit to the shadows you are seeing though they are lengthening by the minute?

Before moving out to Italy, it was noted that the area of Tuscany where we were moving was used in the filming of Gladiator, specifically the portion of “Spain” where Maximus once had a home, and the visions of Elysium he sees when he dies, his murdered wife and child waiting for him.

Indeed, I was standing about 10 yards ahead of where Maximus’ wife was (Ridley Scott’s long-time partner). Re-watching the scene with commentary it was learned that this scene was filmed on the last day of shooting, and that that is Crowe’s double, not the actor himself. Oh well. Still, I thought that was kinda cool. Tuscany is, well, pretty large so the coincidence was interesting.

The Art Director would have naturally been pleased to receive every discrete element on its own layer. Digitally, this is possible. But after talking a little with him and figuring what he really needed, I understood that he basically wanted the figure, the mid-ground and the background separable. That still seemed doable within the realms of traditional painting, at least in this instance.

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Netrunner was at least 50% visualizations of cyberspace. But there were a few outdoor, “Meatspace,” locations, to use a word from the cyberpunk genre.

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The tomb image was to take place in an environment with niches around the wall, each of which would have an armored and clothed skeleton in it. They would probably all be crumped heaps by now like the one at left, but let’s pretend the stiff armor kept a couple generally upright as they were leaned against the interior walls.

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The advent of the flip card in Magic brought with it the idea of continuity between two images, something rarely considered in this genre of illustrations. Thankfully these are assigned at once to a single artist, so there is no post-hoc decision making or mind reading of another artist necessary.

In this case, I knew that the bloodstained journal which would be on a stand over a bloody sacrificial altar would also be portrayed on the flip side, which would feature a zoomed-out image of the larger Tomb where this was located. So, both images were composed at once, so I could kind of envision this close-up image within the same environment, lighting and color scheme.

I considered sculpting a little mini version of the altar but just did a couple of doodles instead, one of which was at the angle that would be in the other piece. The serpentine floor pattern was also worked out ahead of time so that it would be consistent in both images.

I seem to be amassing a sub-collection of art that features books. It’s an interesting pigeonhole I’ve managed to land in. Whatever the case, the book was to also feature a world-specific rose brooch, broken, laying on the book.

The text on my submission study mentions glowworms in the ceiling above. The world had designs for ceilings with glyphs that would glow magically, and this was a part of the Tomb’s designs which went unshown in the end. But purple is also the color coded for black mana, which this card uses, so it’s usually a good idea to indicate some purple in illustrations of that type.

So while I mentioned not building a maquette here, the angle was simply extrapolated from the front and ¾ perspective sketches posted above. I don’t know if that’s impressive or not, but I thought I’d mention it—from my vantage it’s just a skill an illustrator needs, to be able to tumble an object mentally and draw it without reference when needed.

Tarrian’s Journal appears as a flip-card with The Tomb of Aclazotz in the Lost Caverns of Ixalan expansion of Magic: the Gathering

One thing my wife has had to kind of accept over time is that whenever we travel somewhere, I’m always taking pictures of random things. This was a greater annoyance back in the day when we would travel with rolls of film, and upon developing them there were all these pictures of tree trunks or rocks or skies or textures. But I’m still frequently falling behind on walks or pausing us at random things, to take photos of whatever.

But over time, that builds up a library of references to pull from and is a necessary part of representational illustration that I imagine most of my colleagues also still do, even with internet image search being there.

So it was that a few years before painting this, I spent the weekend in Santa Cruz with my wife’s family. We went on a couple of walks along some more quiet beaches and I happily stopped to snap photos of coasts, waves, hermit crabs, whatever. Incidentally, this is the second time I’ve used reference from Santa Cruz in a Magic painting. I did grow up in San Jose, so it being the local beach maybe makes that less surprising.

So when I was asked to illustrate these doors sort of hovering over a seaside scene, I knew just where to go. Things like the sparse bubbly foam of a receding wave: these are details that I just wouldn’t be able to recall without referencing. As much as artists try to build up mental references so they can draw and paint spontaneously, or so they can extrapolate detail, the world always offers more and more layers of reality that one can add.

It was specified that this figure stepping out of one of the doors be as indistinct as possible, and that presented an interesting challenge to me as well, to haze out enough from the bright light emanating from that door, while still being visually satisfying.

There was a bit of Stephen King’s, “The Drawing of the Three,” in my mind, certainly, as I worked on this.

I think this might have been my first contribution to the online gallery Every Day Original. There were no guidelines besides, “Make it good.” I mostly did personal works to show there, small drawings and paintings that could scratch the itch for non-illustration work.

For the first and a few subsequent entries, I decided to reach to music, which has been an occasional place I go for inspiration when illustrating other projects. It isn’t a realm I’d mined much for illustrative purposes on its own. The great thing about illustrating music (especially non-commissioned) is that it has enough abstraction in it, typically, to allow me to approach it and experience it in a slightly subconscious way. It’s different than illustrating stories, which I also enjoy, which requires a bit more in the way of comprehension and representation whether narrative or metaphorical. With music, it’s much more...I don’t know, I feel as if it puts me in the place where dreams come from--at least certain music, and specifically when I’m listening intently, as I did while having this track on repeat for a long time while sketching and working.

For this piece I picked a favorite track of mine, “This Twilight Garden,” by The Cure. It was a b-side track so isn’t perhaps as widely known, but for 30+ years now (!) has been a song I can return to any time and bliss out. There are a few songs that seem to have tapped right into a part of your soul, allowing it to manifest outside of you. Maybe you know what I mean. This is one such for me. It’s like having a part of your emotional state reflected back at you. Amazing that music can do such a thing from time to time.

One thing I loved about this series of works produced for EDO was the rather spontaneous nature of them. Illustrations are often meticulously planned so that the final execution leaves little to nothing to chance, because the stakes are much higher. On some occasions I wouldn’t even do thumbnails.

During this era, I did a small number of uncommissioned pieces to stretch out a bit and try to redirect my portfolio some. Starship Traveler was one such, today’s piece was another, related.

Despite the fact that both of Starship Traveler and this piece are quite different, in terms of genre, they both use the Fighting Fantasy series of game books as their inspiration. I greatly enjoyed these as a kid, and in my 20s I had taken to re-purchasing the books I had long since disposed of from Jr. High. There were some 20 released in the USA and the internet era informed me that the series went to like 50 or something in the UK, which blew my mind and sparked this attempt to collect them anew. This included the UK editions.

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As well, there was this weird shift in publishers, with this game ending up at a spin-off company that was finally folded within Wizards of the Coast. So I was working with Wizards people through this other entity.

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But this was a realm that I was not familiar with, and I had not played much Magic in the prior 10 years, so I was out of touch. A couple of folks kindly guided me into this, including the commissioner for this Monk token.

I did a few such, and also had some now to take with me to events, where I learned more about this niche product category. Before very long, I understood I could and should be producing these on my own, and so I did, and since then have produced coming up on 100 different ones. I was able to double-dip on this one, and the study I produced was made available on Every Day Original.

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In 2011, I produced a small catalog featuring recent works, and used it as my portfolio. This was back in the days when physical portfolios were still in use, although digital submissions were already popular. I also printed a few extra and made them available for sale. On the inside cover of a few, I did some sketches. As I recently was reminded of these after posting The Gray Mouser, I dug some up and present them for this month’s Sketch Gallery.

The Gray Mouser was the cover of the catalog, so he featured in a couple of the drawings. These were done with black ink over very light pencil—the paper was semi-glossy so you couldn’t effectively use pencil on it.

I haven’t gotten around to posting my painting of the Mouser’s companion Fafhrd, but I included one sketch with him, as well. And you can see the cover of the catalog here, as well.

In this case we have a Poisonous Wyvern, who has perched upon a spire in this town, essentially unreachable, and is about to lay waste to it with its noxious breath. The succeeding illustrations would illustrate the ruin of this town, and I used time-of day and the destruction of the buildings seen, to illustrate this. The wyvern’s look would also begin to change to become a bit more fearsome in each iteration.

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Having worked on a few Star Wars RPG projects in this era, I got the itch to do something a little more ambitious than the spot illustrations that made up that work. Spot illustrations are what they are--small, often minimal background, typically character shots or simple narratives. They don’t really lend themselves well to more involved paintings. So I started playing around with some ideas for doing a non-commissioned Star Wars piece.

Uncommissioned works tend to be done in and around paying jobs, or during a break between the end of one job and the start of another. In more recent years, this time is taken up with my Hearts for Hardware series, or landscape work, or small card art commissions like the ones I offer here most months. I have never felt comfortable with how I allot that small percentage of my year, and I change my mind about it seemingly annually.

I’d forgotten that I was originally conceiving this as a vertical and more character than scene-oriented piece. All my thumbnails were of this sort. Apparently at some point I had a conversation with another artist friend about these—perhaps I was having a hard time choosing—and the composition changed to horizontal and more scene-based. Interestingly, preliminary work for this painting isn’t really available, and this was in an era where I was more carefully archiving things.

I worked on this and finished it right around the time of New York Comic-Con that February. I had an easel behind my 1/2 table, which isn’t much for displaying larger works, and so half the day I’d toss up this Star Wars painting, the other half of the day I’d put up my Batman and Rorschach pieces.

Having some time to sit with it throughout the weekend, by the end of the show I decided it wasn’t done, despite it being signed and with a nice layer of Galkyd over it to seal it. That’s not a good realization, or feeling. So some time after the con I did some digital playing around with the scan I had. Basically, I was unsatisfied with the entirety of the foreground environment. So I re-imagined it and got back to work, then shelved it, then took it out and continued, then shelved it...until finally I finished it again.

The additional work added context and some complexity that was needed. In the end, however, it was an improvement, but years later, looking at the original thumbnails again, I really do wonder what it was in that conversation that changed my mind about this whole piece, as I prefer my original concepts! It has often been valuable to get a trusted artist friend’s eyes on a piece, but it can also be tricky to hear critique and be selective in how one applies it. The critique requires its own critique, sometimes.

I happened to have the assignment sheet for this piece still, faxed over.

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The setup here is simple. Lorwyn is a more whimsical fantasy aesthetic, so treant type creatures featured in it. In this case, one such was to be consumed by Magical fire. So there were two things to consider, really—the treant and the fire. Lorwyn was also more amenable to fun characterization. And so, we had attempt number one.

All things considered, I quite liked this version (which is why I submitted it). Fitting in most of the tree in a readable way at a small size was a nice bonus, and I was able to show the flames proceeding from outside the frame, coming from the player’s general direction into the composition. The lopsided foliage and expression gave it some whimsy as well. The thumbnail was clear enough that I didn’t even redraw it, but just toned it and submitted it. You can also see that it was assigned as Dessicating Flame.

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I was allowed an unusually long deadline here as I couldn’t begin for awhile; I didn’t end up needing all the extra time, but it was super accommodating of Art Director Zack Stella at a time when what I needed a whole lot more of was time.

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