| | Current Music: | Butthole Surfers - Independent Worm Saloon | | Subject: | Simyan & Mokkari | | Time: | 11:34 pm |
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| So I’ve been eating up the recent Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus collections lately. It blows my mind how Kirby can draw and how he jams together crazy ideas coming from every which direction. This comic features two minor bad guys from the comics. I kinda like them, for some reason. They’re just two schlubs, servants of Darkseid who do crazy experiments in their hidden lab. They come off as chummy somehow.
Anyhow, it’s been a little while since I did a comic. Feels good to get back into it, though it was hard shifting back into that frame of mind.
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| Calling everyone who wants to engage in some fun collaboration:
The Game Chef Artists First! art and game design contest is seeking art submissions until April 5th.
We are looking for illustrations for a roleplaying game that does not exist, created in styles both far and near the RPG mainstream. The illustrations will then be used by a large pool of designers to create those very games.
The Skinny
To enter, artists must draw a series of illustrations for a role-playing game text that doesn't exist!
1. There must be 3-5 original (created for the contest) black and white illustrations, suitable for the interior of a book
2. B&W only, size should be from 1/4 to a full 8.5x11 page, although strange form factors are A-OK (everything doesn't need to be contained in a rectangular bounding box)
3. Each illustration should showcase a place, mood, person, idea or event. The illustrations shoud be thematically connected in some way.
4. Submissions must be posted in the Game Chef forum as a unique thread in the Art Submissions category, or as an e-mail to gamechef08@gmail.com by 12:01am April 6th, 2008
For complete contest information please visit [url=http://www.game-chef.com/af2008]our website[/url]
Artists First is part of the Game Chef contest. Game Chef has run annually since 2002, and has become a center for small press and independent role-playing game development. Last year more than 120 people participated, and several games from that contest are in active playtest with plans for publication.
If you're a designer and not an artist, we don't need you for a couple of weeks, but feel free to register and sound off. Also, please repost this announcement anywhere you think it'll catch some eyeballs. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Over yonder at the Crown Commission boards we had a Secret Santa gift exchange thing. I did this one for online pal, Phil McAndrew.
My esteemed co-worker, Curtis Luciani, asked me to design some stuff for his five-person production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. This first one was done for the theatre's webpage.
And these are two drafts for the print poster. They're going with the shipwreck design (though I prefer the finger puppets myself).
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I've been reading Showcase Presents: Green Lantern, vol. 2 lately. It's easy to gobble this stuff up, though it can be a bit frustrating at times. There are some nice and weird little ideas in some of those stories though, that I find inspiring. These are some sketches of some of Green Lantern's villains, including Star Sapphire, Hector Hammond, Sonar, Sinestro and Tiger Shark. I like Hector Hammond best. He's a scientist who greatly increased the size of his brain at the cost of having his body atrophy and become paralysed. There are some great panels where Green Lantern or a prison guard is carrying him around. His little body is limp in their arms, but his swollen head is upright and he stares off into space with this sort of angry vacancy, if that makes sense. Seems like there's some good stuff to work with there. I wonder if DC made much use of him. I've read very little DC apart from the Showcase stuff, so I have no idea what became of him. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Guided by Voices - Sopr Joe | | Subject: | Babygrinding #5 | | Time: | 08:04 pm |
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Here's a sketch dump for Babygrinding purposes. I'm going to try and keep up with it, but I've removed myself from the lj group. I looked at my friends page today and it was just an unmanageable monstrosity, most of which was taken up by the Babygrind people. There's lots of great art there, but there's a lot that's not so interesting to me personally, either, and that's drowning out the stuff I want to see. Oh whell.
This is a messy pastiche of work doodles I've done over the last few days. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
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Caption reads, “Janek’s above-ground grave, Krasinski Square, Old Town.”
This is the final illustration in the book. Nice and sad. | | comments: Leave a comment |
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Caption reads, “Irka and Pelikan are executed by Waffen-SS Brigade RONA Ukrainian auxiliaries.”
As I near the end of posting these illustrations, I'm noticing how often I used a straight ahead, front and center composition. I don't know how I let that happen. I should have had a lot more variation in this regard. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Blitzen Trapper - Wild Mountain Nation | | Subject: | Grey Ranks - Kiss | | Time: | 10:57 pm |
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Caption reads, “A furtive rendezvous: Irka and Pelikan’s last kiss, in Irka’s ruined bedroom at number 12 Elekcyjna Street, Wola.”
I kinda like the angle of this one, though the perspective might be a bit off. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
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Caption reads, “Last stand on Filtrowa Street. Janek dies in Ochota.” | | comments: Leave a comment |
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Caption reads, “Irka and Pelikan escape an artillery barrage beneath the Parish House of the Church of the Redeemer, 37 Marszalkowska Street.”
Oh Jeff Bent and your love of using expressive hands, but inability to draw said limbs with any degree of grace! | | comments: Leave a comment |
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Book caption reads: “The crew celebrates outside the liberated Hotel Adria”.
You know, I don’t think I’d ever drawn a swastika prior to this illustration. It was kind of an oogie feeling, even if it’s there to show the kids’ victory over the Nazis. Other than that, this one was nice to draw because it was really the only illustration in which the characters are shown as happy… which makes the later illustrations all the grimmer I think. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
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Book caption reads, “One way to get a rifle: Janek and Pelikan in a Gibalskiego Street apartment, Wola." | | comments: Leave a comment |
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Caption reads, “Janek learns a hard lesson outside Number 25 Szucha Street- Gestapo headquarters”
This is the first illustration that hints at the brutality of the game’s setting. It’s probably the most action-packed of the various illustrations. I think the thing I liked best about this one is the flying hat belonging to the poor guy in the background. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
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The caption for this illustration reads, “At the Czerniakowska checkpoint, Janek’s forged papers almost cost a German soldier his life.” | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
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The caption for this illustration reads, “Janek and Jadwiga, caught in the act beneath a statue of Zawisza, the Black Knight”.
This was the first illustration in the book, and the initial piece that landed me the gig. Jason provided me with a ton of reference pictures, which were really helpful and he had some specific ideas about what he wanted the subjects of each of the illustrations to be. Looking at those pictures, I wanted to try and capture something of the black and the greys I saw in them, so I used ink wash. It had been a long time since I’d broken out my brushes and bottle of ink, but it was fun. I never really achieved the level of control with the ink that I wanted, but didn’t end up ruining anything either. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
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A few months ago I completed a big illustration commission. An independent game designer, Jason Morningstar contacted me and asked me if I was interested in illustrating his new book, which was a roleplaying game set during the 1944 Polish uprising against the Germans. The players take on the role of teenagers trying to take back their city and all the heartbreak that comes along with it. The subject matter was outside my usual range, but I decided that it was the kind of challenge that would be interesting to take on, so I did.
You can read more about the game here, at the Bully Pulpit Games website, and if it piques your interest, you can buy it here.
This is the wraparound cover design I submitted to Jason. It was the last illustration I did and the only one using colour. He (and I) both wanted something striking, and that’s what I was attempting here, with the red buildings and white sky, which was inspired by the Polish flag. The characters here are the characters we follow through the various interior illustrations, which I’ll be posting later. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
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sporecloud's journal
