Trade Station Concepts

After all the preparation (in form of spaceship sketches) it was finally time to head into an actual illustration.  The Brief given to me was for an image "showing an alien world with a space station in orbit and a couple of "trader" ships going about their business." I sent in the the rough thumbnails above for approval.

My client liked number 4, with the astronaut (actually I envisioned him being a signal officer, as you might see on an aircraft carrier) directing the ship in.  But he also like the more circular landing bays as well.  I made some more thumbnails trying to integrate the two ideas and then created a larger, more polished thumnail to use as a reference for the final image.

Shrine to Hachiman Final

Barring some last minute tweaks, this will be the final version of my Shrine to Hachiman remake.  What was supposed to be a relatively easy image took me far longer than I had anticipated.  I wanted to make sure this image was the best I could make it at this point in time, because it will be the final artwork in my L5R set of remakes. I'm still going back to the old artworks and cleaning things up here and there, but I should be submitting sometime next month, crossing my fingers and hoping to at least get some feedback from their art directors.  Wish me luck!

Shrine to Hachiman WIP

This is where I was at about a week ago.  I thought that this piece was almost done.  I was wrong.  Upon closer scrutiny, there were many things that were wrong with it.  It was kind of soul crushing to realize that I needed to do so much work to fix it, but it was my own fault for not sorting things out in the thumbnail stage (though to be fair I thought I had).  I'll go into more detail about this when I'm finally done with it, but for now marvel at this half finished work.

Color Studies

My last L5R remake is going to be another environment.  I haven't finalized what it'll be yet, but I do know that I really want to really punch up the colors so that it's more vibrant and exciting than the Oyo Seido piece.  Color has always been my weakness, so I decided to do some long overdue color exercises. It's a pretty simple exercise that most any artist can do, and it only takes a couple of hours.

First I looked for a bunch of mountain landscapes on Google images, picking a variety of scenes and colors. Next I prepared a set oh nine thumbnail sized canvases.  Then one by one I attempt to recreate the color scheme of each photograph, making sure to never use the eyedropper tool (unless the color has already been laid down).  It's a trick I learned from someone else's blog (I forget which), but the idea was to train your eyes to really see color and decide which colors to lay down instead of just picking a swatch and/or picking a color from a photograph.  I don't know how successful the exercise was, but it was a lot of fun, and I'll probably do a couple more of these before hunkering down and working on the next piece.

Oyo Seido Final

I had a hard time letting go of this piece because something about it just seemed wrong to me.  When I put it up on the regular message boards for feedback there wasn't much comment, and the critiques I did get stressed stuff that I a) didn't really feel were the problem or b) entailed changing so much of the piece that I might as well start afresh.  Some critiques I got said there needed to be more detail in the foliage, and that the straight on perspective is kind of boring.  While more detail might help somewhat, I think that just adding more detail wouldn't solve the main problem, which is that the artwork is just a little...dull.  It's functional and practical but not really interesting . A change in the perspective might fix that, but again that would mean starting from scratch, so I might as well just devote myself to a new piece if that's the case.  As a last resort to make things a little more interesting I added a forest mouse on the steps of the temple, looking for some scraps in the offering bowl.  While realistically you probably wouldn't even notice the mouse if this was actually made into a card, I feel like adding that one elements makes the piece as a while just a little bit more interesting.

I did also experiment a little bit with making this a night time scene and inserting some fireflies for instant effect.  It did look much more interesting this way, but if I were to do it properly I'd have to go back to the beginning of coloring the piece, and I'm pretty much sick of this piece already!  Time to move on to the last artwork, which will be another environment piece.

Oyo Seido Colors

Choosing a color scheme has always been difficult for me, and it's no different with this piece.  My inclination s towards the color scheme with the bright red temple, but I fret over whether this is just because the color red is such an attention grabber.

Oyo Seido WIP

Working on this in my off hours.  Slooooowly getting there.  Remake of this card.

Landscape Sketches

Apologies for not posting for a month!  I'll try to keep to a once a week track from here on out, but I'm not making promises so why do I bother? (and for that matter why do you?).  Anyway, these are some landscape sketches I made in preparation for my next L5R remake.  It'll be the 4th of 5 and one of two environment pieces.  I drew inspiration from a photobook of China, which I picked up during a sweet National bookstore sale for just 200 bucks.  More next week (maybe)!

Legend of the Five Rings : Introspection

I've long wanted to have some of my artwork on CCGs like L5R. On many of the podcasts and art blogs I frequent, they advise aspiring artists to create work that suits a specific property and only show that specific work.  The argument is that an art director will not want to waste time wondering if you'll be a fit for their property, so if you can show it to them beforehand with some ready-made work, it'll make it that easier for them to decide to hire you.  This is the first of what will eventually become a set of L5R card art that I'm looking to present to the art directors at Alderac.

For this piece, I was inspired by the Daibutsu, or Great (ie Large) Buddhas of Japan, since neither of the previous versions of the "Introspection" card featured any kind of statue.  Since the butsu or Buddha doesn't actually exist in Rokugan, I figured I'd make the statue a representation of Shinsei, the wise monk of Rokugan who was advisor to the kami.  To be honest I don't know enough about Rokugan yet to know if there are such statues put up to honor him, but it doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine that there are such statues in place.  One interesting thing about Shinsei is that according to legend he has a crow as a permanent companion.  Instead of including the crow in the statue, I though that having a live crow perched on the statue's shoulder would be more interesting, sort of alluding that crows have an affinity for the statue, while at the same time giving the viewer an additional sense of the scale of the statue.  I've pasted my piece on top of the original, while also showing the original to the right for comparison.

This is the first of what will be five (I thought it was apt) pieces that I will complete over the next few months then submit to Alderac entertainment.  I'll be working on them on and off in between my current projects so I don't really have a deadline for them, but hopefully I'll have them done before the middle of next year.  Not sure what the next card will be, but if anyone has any requests I'd be happy to hear them.