Transitory States
Edward:
David S Leyman:
Hisham:
Luke:
James Kight:
king:
Hisham and Sila has been writing stuff down on this weblog since 2005. Sometimes they post photos of family, sometimes they talk about film, books and music, sometimes there is artwork and stuff about tabletop gaming.
A follow up post from the earlier D'Kathi alien concept design, here are the final artwork commissioned by Christopher Mennell for his Across The Stars science fiction game setting. While it starts out looking and feeling Star Trek with a lot of analogous signature elements, it diverges in many ways and has the potential for imaginative game masters to take it into high concept science fiction.
Click on the thumbnail above to view a bigger image of Vader reading the Imperial Sourcebook.
Christopher Mennell's Across The Stars commission is presently being worked on. Here's a delightful surprise that occurred over email / Google+ discussions of the project.
One of the aliens I have to create an initial form for is the D'Kathi. The image below is my first sketch of the alien's head.
Suddenly, artist Eric Quigley came up with his own painting of my D'Kathi design using Painter and Photoshop. It looks spectacular as can be seen below.
Click here to visit Eric's website.
DWD Studios came up with a great project suggestion. Somewhat like Wicked North Games' Azamar: The Paradise Fragment project, I was to create a cover and six interior black and white artwork, which the game developers will create a adventure around them. The adventure will be a supplement to their BareBones Fantasy RPG.
The cover has a creature that's pretty blue about things. How will the rest of the artwork be used in the still-untitled adventure? Watch this space when I announce its eventual release at the end of the year.
Here are the rest of the interior images.
Here is a large artwork I made for Kallisti Press's The Vicious Crucible of the Eburnean Tower RPG, to be released later. Strange things are happening in and around the Eburnean Tower. Click on the picture above to see a larger image.
You can download for free the first Vicious Crucible game The Vicious Crucible of Verdigris Valley here to check it out!
And here is the latest batch of creatures that inhabit not just the deserts, but the lesser illustrated jungle and tundra of Westward... presented in the form of a 1280px by 800px wallpaper!
Tentative names from left to right: Ice Fish, Entracter Crab Spider, Death Ogler, Snow Globber.
Watch for the Westward RPG core rule book to be released by year's end!
Heroic Journey Publishing commissioned a series of artwork for the Mecha Mercenaries supplement for their Mecha RPG. Here are some, but not all, of the mecha arrayed together to form a 1280px by 800px black and white wallpaper for your widescreen monitor.
Check out their fantastic Mecha RPG at DriveThruRPG, which is fun, simple to play and very true to its source!
Some more bizarre alien creatures were commissioned by Wicked North Games for their space steampunk western role-playing game Westward!
While you're riding a shieldhorse or piloting a steam-powered mech, you might come across these guys in the Badlands of Westward.
Remember the tusker?
So, let me ask you this: what do you suppose is the medium used to draw the above concept sketch of the Tusker for the Westward RPG bestiary?
So it came to pass that if I needed to use the new Bamboo Pen graphics tablet, I had to upgrade my operating system. Long story short: I decided on totally replacing my ArtistX 1.0 OS with Ubuntu's latest Long Term Support distro, which was 12.04 also dubbed "Precise Pangolin". After installing the sucker, I finally came face to face for the first time... with the Unity desktop! Click on the thumbnail above to see the desktop, including the Dash HUD.
Searching Ubuntuforums.org, I discovered how make a 3rd generation Bamboo Pen work with the Precise. I also reread on how to set up the Benq scanner using Snapscan's binary file so I can scan using Sane or GIMP.
Finally, I installed MyPaint I found on Ubuntu Software Center and discovered that it worked great with the Bamboo.
Below is my first doodle-type sketch using the tablet in conjunction with MyPaint: a handsome sort of fellow.
This series of creatures I drew for Westward RPG from Wicked North Games is special. I was tasked with proposing and designing these beasts from scratch. Once approved by Wicked North, I started illustrating them with ink and water colours! Of course, the names might be changed by the writers during editing.
Keep an eye out for Westward the steampunk western roleplaying game in space, produced by Wicked North Games to be released in the near future.
I've illustrated this piece for a new Troll in the Corner podcast series entitled "Monsters of the Shattered World", written by Brent Newhall and edited by Quinn Conklin. Their first podcast portrays an adventuring party's encounter with a shoal of Sahuagins. The artwork is mostly inkwork supplemented by digital stars. Why digital? Because my toothbrush has yet to be trashed, salvaged and reused as white paint sprayer.
Download Troll in the Corner's Monsters of the Shattered World #1: The Sea Devils.
Check out the bigger image here on DeviantArt.
Here are four more preview creatures from Wicked North Games' Westward RPG! Sure it's a steampunk western set in space, but what sort of strange critters would PCs be up against in the wilderlands of Westward?
I has some time to spare one morning and thought I'd draw one of the old classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons. I was then torn between two characters: Space Ghost or Tundro of the Herculoids. Ultimately I thought I'd give Space Ghost a try.
Using brush and ink, I tried giving Space Ghost a dramatic central shadow. The illustration was scanned and coloured digitally using GIMP. Finally, the colour layer was run through GIMP's Ziptone filter to give it a comic book feel.
Click here for a bigger image on DeviantArt.
Space Ghost, I've since learnt, was designed for Hanna Barbera by famed cartoonist and comic book artist Alex Toth.
Wicked North Games, who produced the Azamar role-playing game, using the Cinema6 engine, based on the classic West End Games' Open D6 system, will be producing a new RPG.
The game is entitled Westward and employes a steampunk western setting on another planet in the far future. I have been commissioned to draw some critters that will inhabit the badlands of Westward. Because the Westward Kickstarter campaign has been very successful, Wicked North Games will be publishing a full-colour core rule book! Here is an early preview of the critters of the setting.
Here are glimpses of page borders done for Kallisti Press' Vicious Crucible fantasy role-playing game by Josh Roby. I drew these some weeks ago on the netbook as it was slowly dying, but now the netbook's power supply is completely borked. Time to go get it fixed.
Click here to check out a Vicious Crucible preview of a Verdigis Valley map with one of the borders!
Recently, Purple Duck Games commissioned four stock role-playing game character artwork for their Purple Mountain 10 product, to be released soon!
Player character? Non-player character? Go nuts with these!
Wicked North Game has been busy developing a new role-playing game using their Cinema 6 variant of the Open D6 system, entitled Westward. I have been given the task to visually design some creatures for Westward, based on descriptions and stats by Peter Schweighofer.
Here are initial designs that were sketched with no text description to whet your appetite.
Here are five pieces of color art that give us a glimpse into Kallisti Press' Vicious Crucible fantasy role-playing game by Josh Roby. These artwork I did are part of a single large image that features major and minor characters from the games in a combined stylistic view of the realm.
But what's really going on in these images? I guess we'll have to wait for the upcoming release of Vicious Crucible.
