Sneak Attack blackenwhite

Westward Art: Sneak Attack

Recently, I was assigned to draw a vertical “sneak attack” scene for Wicked North Games’ upcoming Westward RPG. The scene involved a dark-clad assassin about to attack a nervous looking gentleman in the city streets at night. The final artwork is displayed above. Below are some process artwork for the piece. The first image shows three black and white sketches / studies. #1 is the original sketch where the assassin was changed into the version in #2 because she did not convey enough physical steampunk tropes. It’s quite difficult to design a skin-tight assassin’s garb, because most steampunk costumes are loose and puffed up in parts. After #2 was approved, I created a grayscale study in the form of #3 to see how light will play off the characters, objects and building. Then I painted the below, with separate layers making up the different characters, the vapour and particulates in […]

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DANAI/Ina and Hokusai posing for a selfie while sneaking into Yamaha-Pacifica

Eclipse Phase: A Hidden Industry

GOKL‘s Eclipse Phase “Clouds of the Morning Star” story arc (gamemastered by Ivan) continues from the previous session. Wandering Ina (played by Andrew) and DANAI (played by Darren) – both in a single Venusian glider morph – continued their investigation of a massive ego theft ring that may have passed through the Cloud Nine aerostat – a floating city in the skies of Venus. Meanwhile, Cable and Hokusai (played by me) manned their newly purchased airship, hidden in the clouds out of sight from Cloud Nine. Since Kai was unable to make it, this session had three player characters, but with two of them inhabiting one body, which was a great concept in roleplaying. The Setup It was time Hokusai delivered more weapons and gear by sneaking onto Cloud Nine. DANAI/Ina had managed to hack into Cloud Nine’s aerostat administration network and gave themselves Security-level permissions in the system. Employing […]

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Brawling - finished

Westward RPG: Brawling

I sometimes use MyPaint, an open source painting program to create my work. It has less features than GIMP, but I love how the brush paint digitally as I move the Wacom tablet stylus. This is how I painted the “Brawling” artwork for Wicked North Games upcoming Westward RPG that was featured in a previous post. At first I sketched the scene quickly in MyPaint using one of the Pencil tools. Initially the person who was throwing the punch was a man, but then I changed it to a woman in mid-sketch. I decided on a yellowish hue for the image before I started painting the sky upon the layer immediately below the pencil sketch layer. Then I started colour blocking one character, playing with some colours over it to see if they meshed well. I started to block the other character as well as refine the punch thrower. The […]

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Eclipse Phase: Blimps and Back Seat Driving

The adventure continued on and around Venus… even as the atmosphere outside where we played appeared to resemble Venus in texture and colour. But we’re not talking about the Great Smothering Haze of 2013; we’re talking about last Sunday’s Eclipse Phase session. As Kage’s people began investigating the unregistered airlock from which the Spulturatorah Arcology ego bank thieves of had escaped from Gerlach station, Gamera Security returned to their office, leaving Wandering Kid in his battered arachnoid morph to help guard the airlock. Aggregators via Mesh links alerted them to a relevant news story that developed in the in Jupiter space: Diz, the infomorph inhabiting their old spacecraft the Fastball Special had hacked into Jovian traffic control to allow itself a clear path upwards from the ecliptic plane… toward interstellar space. The ship was unoccupied at the time, other than a hundred kilos of paper cranes. Cable informed this to […]

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The Claws of a Bugbear

Monsters of the Shattered World Podcast, Season 2

In the début season of Monsters of the Shattered World, an imaginative fantasy podcast that features the story of an adventuring party produced by Brent Newhall, I was commissioned to illustrate two out of the five episodes that were made. The second season, however, I was tasked with completing all seven episodes of the podcasts. Here are some of the illustrations I drew for season two. To listen to each episode, click on the link above to download them for free at Troll in the Corner, or obtain them from iTunes here. Click here to view artwork from the first episode of the first season.

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Demolitions

Westward Scenes

Here are some scenes I drew as filler are in the Characters, Attributes and Skills section of the Westward RPG by Wicked North Games. These scenes, also drawn by Alexander Gustafson, Ryan Rhodes and Cory DeVore, gives players an idea of what your players can be doing on the steampunk planet of Westward and what the millieux feels like. You could arm-wrestle an Enclave – a steampunk cyborg – and win! You could write a secret messages! You could punch a guy in the jaw because he hadn’t showered in two months. You could blow up a water tower for shits and giggles. Not really for giggles since water is precious here. Westward RPG will be available online or at your FLGS later this year.

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Ivan prepares to shank his players

Eclipse Phase: Venereal Problems

The GOKL Eclipse Phase RPG campaign “Fastball Express” has started up again, and the uplift neo-octopus Hokusai Tarnungshaut is back in action, except he no longer has eight tentacles. Three game sessions were held so far and I managed to participate in two. So the story goes: some of the intrepid posthumans of the Fastball Express hypercorp was darkcasted to Parvati, an aerostat high above the surface of Venus. Hokusai had died some time earlier his octomorph blown up by a bomb, and the team retrieved his cortical stack and resleeved his ego in a worker pod morph. However, Hokusai remembered nothing else before waking up in an arachnoid sleeve at Parvati with Billy Cable Junior the neotenic, Danai and Dexter, their memories edited “for security reasons”. (That doesn’t sound suspicious at all, right? RIGHT?) Their Morningstar Corporation contact gave them a mission to discreetly investigate diseased biomorphs which had […]

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Covert Ops Map

BareBones Covert Ops Map

Here’s a thumbnail of a map I drew for DwD Studios‘ BareBones Covert Ops RPG. Ultimately S.E.C.T.O.R. base locations will populate this chart. What is S.E.C.T.O.R., you ask? I have no idea yet. Look for the upcoming book which should be released later this year.

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Pistol with bayonet

Balneum Blue: Gnatha Weapons

I drew some aquatic biotech ranged weapons for a project for Star Frontiersman magazine. These are biotech gear created by an alien species called the Gnatha. These are not merely tools, but they are living, breathing organisms! These creatures can swim on their own accord, while the Gnatha use them to throw deadly projectiles at enemies. Presumably the Gnatha created these living weapons  by genetically altering and splicing together different species of octopus, jellyfish, molluscs and even corals.

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Cover for Five’s The End

[[image:ebb-n-folks-5s-the-end-cover.jpg:Cover with the creature Three:center:0]] Here is another cover commissioned by Ebb and Folks. Five’s The End is a novella by David Leyman that completes the trilogy that begins with Three’s Company and continues with Four of a Kind (the second artwork in this post). The style of digital inks and colours (instead of a painterly look) of the cover for all three novellas is an editorial decision.

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Squeak, Claire and Dutch

SWAG: Squeak, Claire and Dutch

I love it when children play RPGs. Their young imagination make any game soar. If there’s any way to help introverted children to help express themselves more and be better speakers, I would always recommend parents to run tabletop RPGs for them. This was why I immediately took this request on the Star Wars Artists’ Guild, which was requested by Juanflaco. He gamemastered a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG game for his children, ages 12, 9 and 7. The 12-year-old plays Claire, the young teenager on the run from Tatooine. The 7-year-old plays R2-79 a.k.a. “Squeak”, Claire’s astromech droid. The 9-year-old plays Dutch an amnesiac former Clone pilot who has to protect the two. Click here for the forum request. Click here for the SWAG art post. Click here for a larger image at DeviantArt.

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Hishgraphics Gallery v3.0

[[image:2013-gallery-index.jpg:The Louvre… or something:center:0]] If you hadn’t noticed, the gallery on this site had been out of commission for many, many months. Any links to it, such as the one at the top of the left column of this blog’s index page, points to the DeviantArt gallery instead. It died because of my monkeying around with the v2.0 gallery‘s Coppermine CMS. I have now rebuilt the gallery using Zenphoto, and have spent all last night and this morning populating gallery. I’ve also ensured that there are links to released products. It’s not nearly finished. There are some more customers’  gallery to set up and populate. Click here to check it out! What’s v1.0 gallery, you ask? It was the one before the Coppermine gallery, which was made from HTML files that I wrote. I remember at the time being sad I did not have any artwork I could post that […]

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Snivvian Lovers

Snivvian Long Distance Lovers

Derf requested a pair of Snivvian lovers for his Star Wars RPG campaign. He plays a Snivvian student on Coruscant who has a long-distance relationship with a holodrama scenist back on Cadomai. Painted in monochome digitally with MyPaint, and coloured using GIMP 2.8. Click here to check out the image (as well as Ryan’s “DAWWWW”) on DeviantArt.

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