Goblin Trailguide

This is one of the few cards I did for Zendikar Magic the gathering. I was really trying to do a detailed and rich background without having it confuse the figure. I always mask out the figure with frisket film to keep the main figure clean. It is always tense, when I take of the film.

The first sketch was kind of too nice. Jeremy Jarvis who is the great art director at Wizards, told me to watch out if it became too comical. My background has always been in comics, but doing traditional fantasy I am always aware of not doing it too comic-like. So when he said that I went back to the desk and changed it. I submitted a new sketch and got good to go.

The transferring look like this before I add greytones.

The final has a few things i like: the blanket he has on the backpack is only colored by the first wash. I kind of like that. The face is almost all done very transparent.

Flockformer

Here is a magiccard illustration. I was asked to do a owl man wizard with a mirror staff. 

I did 2 versions and the art director Jeremy Jarvis said I could choose one myself. He liked both of them. 

The colors is my favorite combination. red and orange and purple. All of it balanced with grey.

Much to my own disliking I did the mirrored faces in the staff digitally. If the original had been bigger I would have tried to paint it with brushes.

Monstermanual 2

This here is my very first cover for Dungeons and Dragons. The book is: Monster Manual 2.

I still remember christmas 1984 when a friend of mine invited me to play this game he just got for christmas, and I killed my first Rust-monster. Back then, the illustrations inside the book and on the cover, was the only visual reprecentation of the world and the stories that emerged from our minds...and they were magical. I decided that, when I got grown up I would do illustrations like these. I would be Larry Elmore, Keith Parkinson and jeff Easly. 

Well I guess I just grew up right now then.

This cover was quite a challenge. it is one thing to make a monster look cool, but it is a great deal more difficult when the anatomy is weird like with the Demogorgon. He has 2 baboon-heads, feet and legs of a lizard and split tentacles from the elbow and down. And a reptile tail. 

When doing the thumb I constantly entangled the tentacles. There is a lot going on there. So I focused on getting the shapes of the arms look tight and interesting and the rest followed from there.  In the thumb I submitted I did not even concentrate on the background or much else but the figure. As long as I had that in place the rest would just have to not cover him up to much or even draw much attention. 

I got one correction...one that I had not seen coming. The art-director was afraid that it looked like one of the tentacles was caressing his crouch! Jesus! I am from Denmark, Land of Naughty; I should have seen that. I shifted the arms a little and we where back on track. 

Then I roughly transfered the thumb to the board. I do this by increasing the size of the thumb from 5 cm to 50cm on a copy-machine. Then smear the back of the copy with grafhite and transfer it by drawing on top of the line on the side that has the lines. Then I draw the final version directly on the board. This way I still keep the drawing proces fresh and spontainously, instead of transfering a neat and fully detailed drawing. I find that it looses a lot of life if I transfer to much. I ink the the whole thing with a pen and add greytones in acrylic. this here version is the final pencil sketch.

After the greytones I take another copy and do a color rough. This is very important to me. The color rough does 2 things. It lets me be bold and testy. When I am satisfied with a color rough I cheat myself not to be nervous when laying colors on the final painting. I have the color rough to prove that everything works. The second thing is that when doing the color rough I already mixed the colors that I am going to use.

The final painting is 50x40 cm on watercolor board. The orange from the color rough has been toned down a little in Photoshop. I kind of like the rough, and wished I had followed it more accurate.

Pathfinder

The red dragon smashing the adventures is for a Pathfinder cover for Paizo Publishing. 

I always enjoyed drawing situations from roleplaying games. Being a devoted roleplayer myself I draw from experiences via first hand knowledge. 

Well in this painting I wanted the heroes to be in serious trouble. The female has been thrown from the balcony and the fighter is down and burning...but I have left them some hope, since the sword of the man at arms is jutting out from the neck of the dragon. Who knows if it is a mortal wound?

The somewhat simple palette was chosen because of the paper I was painting on. For some reason I used a sheet I got left and thought it was the same thing I usually used, but when laying in the first layer, it felt totally different and kind of soaked into the surface in a whole other way than what I had imagined. So I took it from there and used a more thin way of painting. Kind of like a watercolor way. 

had I known I would have left some of the ornaments in pencil instead of inking them first.

the sketch is a scan of the board as it looks right before I start painting. 

Priest

I got assigned to do 6 covers in a row for Paizo Publishing. Before me they had used Wayne Reynolds and Steven Prescott, and I am a huge fan of both of them. So I really had to up it up a notch to be able to compete with those guys. 

The theme of the covers are a main figure and a widescreen illustration

 behind the figure. 

Here is the steps of the illustration for the main figure:

1

I start out with a sketch roughly done and focused on the face and the expression. 

2

Then i clean up the sketch and add the details. in this case a holly book, a sabre and strips of holly scripture hanging from his hands. I do a tonal study in Photoshop and submit it to the art director. 

3 

The final is done in acrylics on paper.  

Retaliator Griffin

For a while I had gotten tired of the way I showed light. I had gotten into a way of always doing rim-light in the same way every time. So I wanted to do a picture that should mirror a more naturalistic light-source but still wanted to keep the rim-light. ( I think it creates a nice 3d feeling )

So this is me in a more updated version when it comes to light:

I was heavy influenced by a painting of James Gurney and more or less stole the color-palette. 

The reason I think this is one of my best card illustration is because the silhouette is so clearly readable and it does very well in a small size. 

As you can see on the sketch I like to keep it fairly simple and not too detailed and done. That way I keep some interesting parts, like background and ornaments and stuff for the final version and do not just color a finished transfered drawing. Paul Bonner was the first one to teach me that, and I thought he was crazy at the time. Now I see that the final result gets more spontaneous that way, and I have tried, ever since, to sort away the fine- sketching part and instead go straight from thumb to drawing directly on the board.

SPECTRUM 16

I got in! and I am so very glad. The thing is, you do not know how many and which picture got in: Your name is on a list; that is it.

But I am hopeing it will be this one: 

It is a painting I did for Fantasy Flight Games.