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.

Howdy world

These are images from the High Moon Studios “Vault” - (http://www.highmoonstudios.com/insiders/vault/index.php), some of the concept art I did while working on the just-released “Bourne Conspiracy” video game.

From the (on hold) space opera graphic novel project.

A quickie digital sketch from last night.

I picked up issue 10 of MCP yesterday, which I do because seeing my comic book work is still enough of a novelty for me that I don’t just wait for my comp copies to show up in the mail. The cool part about working on this story is that the writer Marc Guggenheim manages to have a lot of appearances from different Marvel characters, such as the Thing - pretty fun to draw! Anyway I am done working on this particular story and am now back on covers for the time being. (Well, that and the normal workload of video game design and other illustration work. I just finished up the last bits of revisions on the Fantasy Characters art book, and am now starting on a second book project with the same publisher.)

Here’s a recent illustration for Wizards of the Coast, from their “Keep on the Shadowfell” online dealio. I’ve been experimenting a bit with a more line-art intensive style on some of the recent stuff for them. I think there are instances where it works, and others where a more painterly approach is more appropriate.

I will say that it’s trickier doing line art directly into Photoshop than it is with pencil and paper.