Balor and friends

This is a cover for a Dungeons and Dragon Book. I was going to portrait a bunch of different demons having Balor as the leader of the pack. As you can see from the forst sketch his horns and face has undergone a lot of changes. Also the sketch shows how searching I am in this stage. I need a lot of trying lines to shape the form. I am not one of those who sees it in his mind first and then more or less print it out on paper ( Would be cheaper I guess ).
The colors are some of the brigthest I have ever used and the contrast almost hurt my eyes when I first started blocking in the colors. Paul Bonner, with whom I share a studio, walked by and exclaimed: "Oh my God", when he saw my first couple of layers. I do not think he meant it in a good way so turned it down a notch.

Sea of Blood

This is a cover I did for Fantasy Flight Games. I did a million or at least 40 thumbs trying different angles and setups before settling into this version.

The irony of it is that the final thumb that I liked took less than 10 minutes, where as the rest of them had me sketching and sketching for days. I try to convince myself that they are necessary and lead up to tha final good one. But boy do I wish I could just skip all the ugly ones and get right to the gold in one shot.

When I have sketched the details and all onto the board I ink the whole thing and greytone it in black acrylic, thereby establishing the values of the painting. the greytone painting is scanned and i print out a couple of copies to do colorroughs on.

The painting process is a fast process. I used only three days on this and the whole of one day was spend only on the barbarian. Him being the focal point and hero.

This is one of the paintings I will send in to Spectrum and I cross my fingers that it will get through.

Borderland Ranger

This here is one of my magic illustrations that went through a lot before turning into the version that was printed. I submitted a sketch as you can see here. It had all the dynamic and action that the artdirector was asking for. He told me it should look like an ”Aragorn of Magic the Gathering”, and I kind of aimed at that, just made him a little younger.

Somewhere in the painting process he turned into an Erold Flynn/Selda-pancy in a superhero-like costume. Jeremy – the artdirector – was not going for it. Not at all. So I tried to change it digitally and failed, like all the other times when I try to do major changes on the computer. In the end I reasoned myself into painting on top of Erold Flynn and kind came up with this more muddy leather weatherworn costume, thinking I got nothing to loose. To those who work digitally it might not be a big deal, but I tell you, there is nothing cool about me when painting on top of another painting. I have no Idea if I am messing thi sup for good or actually doing something nice...not in the first half an hour that is. Painting this way is slow. The correction took me the same amount of time as the whole first painting did.

The face got a redo and well...in the end I do not think any of the first ranger was left intact. Except for the strap on the shoulder pjece.