Sh'elved

I thought I'd put one last Shadowmoor block piece up before moving on, Medicine Runner (Swift Dawnhand to me). I like the tone of this card and they way the lighting turned out, maybe because it didn't run away with itself. Looking back, it possibly did on some of the other cards, they look a bit busy colour wise....I guess it's subjective. It was one of the last cards I did for the set (I think) so maybe that's why. I finished this one off at the Wizards offices actually, while I was helping concept out Alara. Used to working from home alone it was a bit strange to be doing work in public, so to speak. I had various people dropping past to see what I was doing in the office so early, most of them liked the rendering of the tree in the foreground...I like how stark the image is, there's very little fuss to it so it feels very quiet.

Here's the sketch (talk about vague) and then my pencils and the finish. You can see that i changed the arm from the sketch to the finish, I think i did that to isolate the medicine bag a little more as it needed to be one of the "important" things in the image.

Details

I got my comp. copies of the Forgotten Realms Players Guide through and thought I'd share some of the finer details in the pieces.
They were commissioned as 1/3 pages but it looks like they ran out of room for them and they got reduced more than I thought they might...plus they turned out a little darker than I thought anticipated so a lot of cool little details were lost. I continued with a new way of working on these that I'd started on some of the WoW cards Ive done. Inspired by the detail mentalist himself, Clint Langley, I borrowed his method of 'painting with photographs' (stop me if I'm getting too technical). I don't use them as raw as Clint does, his can almost be collage like, as I still prefer to retain a more traditional feel to the pieces, I try to get a more painterly effect on them so I do a bit more, well, over painting.

It's a really fun way to work as it introduces texture quite quickly and introduces ideas for detail, like the magic sextant thingy that the corsair piece has (below her buckle). It started out as a bit of obscure detail from a museum exhibit and only ended up there by accident (notice the squid pommels on the swords :).



In this Drow pieces I was perhaps guilty of getting lost in spider details (how the hell was that spider necklace ever going to show up in print??) I was really happy with the eyes on the hand crossbow though.


The Doomguide piece is awash with metal textures I've found on my travels, and again details in the photographs suggested details in the finish I would never have thought (you can see in the sketch things are a bit more basic).