Here are two recent artist proof cards I received from Wizards of the Coast. I haven’t done a whole lot of these, so I think I’m still kind of feeling my way around how the artwork needs to work with the game rules. Anyway they are fun to do, hopefully there will be more down the road. The original artwork can be seen in the COLOR WORKS section of the portfolio.

This is the last page of the Vanguard story in Marvel Comics Presents issue #12, which is out on the store shelves now.

Hi! Earlier this year I worked on this giant piece for Wizards of the Coast. It is the artwork for the new 4th edition Dungeon Master’s Screen. This piece is huge, over 40 inches in width (13200×2550 pixels). It was actually a lot of fun to work on, trying to figure out how to make that many characters inhabit the same space in a way that is not TOO contrived (you can be the judge of whether or not I succeeded in that). There were some interesting problems to deal with, such as where the folds hit and which panel would be used as the “cover” when placed on the store shelves. Also, towards the end of the process I had to incorporate a few extra inches on either end to accommodate some last minute dimension changes. This provided an opportunity to add a couple of creatures to each end. I talk a little more about the making of this piece in the forthcoming “100 Ways to Create Fantasy Figures” book.

hi everybody -

My book “100 Ways to Create Fantasy Figures” will be out in stores around end of October/beginning of November, and is available for pre-order at your favorite online booksellers. The basic approach for this book was to look at 100 different concepts/skills/things-to-think-about/etc. that you might run into as you’re designing and illustrating fantasy-based characters. The book grew out of some of the articles I had written for ImagineFX magazine, and in fact the publisher approached me after seeing some of them.

Anyway, a lot of the illustrations come from work done for Wizards of the Coast and a couple of other clients, and are used to illustrate the various points in the book. This isn’t a real hardcore art fundamentals book, as I kinda learned what I know by flailing along as best I could. What it does represent are some of the things I learned along the way, and the main issues and problems/solutions that I seemed to encounter most often as I worked.

If you’re at all interested in doing fantasy type illustration work, it might be a good resource to see the sort of things you’ll want to think about when putting together a portfolio. Or, you could also just point and laugh.

Here’s some photos of an advance copy that the publisher d00ds sent me. Please pardon the crapness of the photo quality.

hello! Here are some character illustrations from the gaming manual Star Wars - Threats of the Galaxy from Wizards of the Coast.

By the way, yes I did tweak the site design yet again. I can’t get away from the old yellow/gray color scheme, something about it really floats my boat.

Hey wossop

I thought I would post an example of the preliminary sketches I send in to the editors at Marvel for cover art. Usually I will get a suggestion or two from them regarding themes or action or story or whatever, and then I will send a few sketches like these in response. There might be some back and forth depending on how well one or more of them are working (or not). I usually try to send in another shot at 80% - 90% completion just so there’s no surprises.

I’ll post the finished art here once Marvel releases it.

Marvel posted an article a few days ago plugging a recent issue of ImagineFX magazine that featured Marvel cover artists. I was very fortunate to be included with this group, especially given the fact that I have only done a handful of covers for Marvel. (I am working on a few more as we speak, featuring my favorites Spider-man and Wolverine.) Small fish in a big pond! Anyway, click on the image to go to the article.

I contributed a couple of issues’ worth of artwork to William Harms’ IMPALER miniseries from Image Comics. The completed trade paperback containing issues 1-6 is available for pre-order using the code AUG08 2292. Here are some of the pages I supplied.

For more info check out Bill’s site.