Shadowcore

May 21, 2013

Lord of the Rings: the Black Riders

Black Riders - 14 x 36 in., oil on masonite

Hey everyone! Apologies for the absence, here's my latest piece for Fantasy Flight Games. It's box art for their Lord of the Rings card game, with this expansion focusing on the Black Riders. This one was quite a challenge in the beginning, oddly enough I haven't been asked to paint a lot of night scenes so I really had to think about how to approach this one, especially when it came to the color. I wound up focusing on the bluish light of the moon as the main source of color and moving out from there. It seemed to heighten the sense of dread and fear that the scene needed.

(As a side note, unlike the first two this one IS for sale so if you're interested shoot me an email)

April 12, 2013

More recent work - monsters, Monsters, and more MONSTERS

A lot of my monsters have come out recently and I thought I would share them all in one post. I will start things off with my contributions to the March issues of Dungeon and Dragon magazines. I got to do a portrait of the deadly Ogre mercenary Lubash as well as redesign and illustrate an entire army of Mephits...

Lubash the Ogre - The Village of Hommlet

Air, Dust, and Earth Mephits

Mist, Steam, and Water Mephits

Fire, Ice, and Magma Mephits

Heading now to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The mighty Icetromper joins the ranks of the ever growing Star Wars card game by Fantasy Flight Games...

Icetromper

Lastly, I have for you a set of four Marvel Comic aliens that I redesigned for the very awesome The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe REDUXE Edition (OHOTMU Reduxe) blog. The blog's goal is to redesign and celebrate 1000 plus entries in the Handbook to the Marvel Universe. I started off my contribution to the project with these four aliens. You can see a side by side comparison here, Alien Races - Horusians to Judans...

RAWR!

March 15, 2013

Cover Art for Pathfinder's "Chronicle of the Righteous"

Whoo, I can finally show some art again that has nothing to do with cute fashionistas or colorful cartoon creatures ;D (however, if you are interested in cute fashionistas, please may I refer to my website -> http://www.eva-widermann.de/project/disney-city-girl)

Here's the cover artwork for Paizo's upcoming "Chronicle of the Righteous". Plus, I thought I throw in the sketch as well to show you all how messy I actually can be sometimes. There was a time earlier in my career as a freelance illustrator, where I created beautiful clean and sharp sketches prior to my paintings. Those times are gone as you can see ;(

Anyways, enjoy! And I hope to be able to show stuff more frequently again in future.

March 5, 2013

Recent Works - Mushrooms, Dragons, and Kaiju

I have had a several projects all come out at about the same time so I figured I would just lump them all together into one post. Some of these were done relatively recently and some are at least a year old now.

The first piece is from issue 420 of Dragon magazine. I was asked to design and illustrate the lord of all myconids... who is insane... but a good mushroom man all the same.

The next two pieces are the first of the Smaug pieces I was asked to create. You might remember the three Smaug pieces that I had come out this past August for the Gen Con 2012 Battle for Lake-Town deck. Those pieces were done months after I was asked to originally design Smaug for Fantasy Flight Games and to do these two illustrations. It was nice to have a chance to go back and revisit and build upon the Smaug design for the later cards, but this is where they all began.

Lastly is my contribution to the most recent expansion to the Legend of the Five Rings CCG, Torn Asunder. They wanted a giant monster demon that appeared capable of destroying whole provinces. It was hard to not make my very own Kaiju... so I gave in and made one...

The Carrion King

Smaug the Golden

Smaug the Magnificent

Mumoku no Oni
© 2013

RAWR!

February 28, 2013

Reign of Winter parts 2 & 3

Covers for Pathfinder's Reign of Winter: The Shackled Hut, and Maiden, Mother, Crone. I kept the palettes limited, even the warmest hues were mixed with a little blue to maintain a very cold feel. Art direction by Sarah Robinson, cover design by Andrew Vallas.

Grayscale

Color

The finishes turned out very close to the approved sketches. The winter witch's face looked a little odd, so I completely repainted it in color, and the centaur's war hammer needed to be redesigned to match a previous reference.

Final Composites

February 5, 2013

Wookiee Navigator

Here is the first of my Star Wars work for Fantasy Flight Games new line of Star Wars gaming products. This piece is from their new Star Wars card game core set that came out in January. It is a might Wookiee and the card is aptly named... Wookiee Navigator.

Yes, the Wookiee is at a gunner station - You don't sit in one place the entire time you are in a star ship, remember that time when Han was in a gunner station?

No, this is NOT Chewbacca - From the very beginning the card had to be very much the "NOT Chewbacca" card, hence the vastly different fur color and pattern.

Now that the two things I keep hearing OVER AND OVER again are out of the way, here is the Wookiee Navigator...

Wookiee Navigator

I think in fact he is saying, "RAWR!" in the illustration. Here is the drawing that I did for this piece...

Wookiee Navigator - Drawing

It was very important that this piece read, "NOT Chewbacca" so after I submitted the original version of the final there was some concern that the piece still looked too much like Chewbacca. If you are at all familiar with how Chewbacca looks it would be immediately clear that this was not everybody's favorite Wookiee. The call to change it still came down and my art director was there to save me from myself and made sure they got the changes they wanted to see. Here is the original version...

ORIGINAL Wookiee Navigator

Here is a progression of the painting in 8 easy steps.... it is just that easy and that hard...

Wookiee Navigator - Process progression

And now a handy dandy side by side comparison of the two final stages of the Wookiee Navigator. I was really resistant to the final production Wookiee for a long time, but I think it is finally growing on me. It is hard to have such a major change made to the first piece done for a product that has been a love of mine since I was three years old. But I got over it... maybe...

Wookiee Navigator - final and original comparison

Last but not least, here is the how the actual card turned out. I think it is funny that even though it says 'Wookiee Navigator' and nowhere does it say Chewbacca people are still complaining that Chewbacca is the wrong color... oh well...

Wookiee Navigator Card

RAWR!

February 4, 2013

Remorseless Winter

Hey guys, wanted to share a new WoW sample piece I recently finished. In between jobs and holidays and moving, I'm glad to finally have this portfolio piece done. With each World of Warcraft expansion, there are new class spells and abilities along with armor sets and other content added into the game, occasionally I'll read through them and see if any sound like fun to illustrate. Most of them are great descriptions to work from. This time around, I knew I wanted to do a Death Knight piece, and came across one of the new spells called "Remorseless Winter."

Remorseless Winter

February 1, 2013

Bestiary: Ye Olde Creature Catalogue

I realized that I had not posted a recent Dungeons & Dragons monster I got to update and illustrate, time to rectify that oversight... Dragon #418 features the article, Bestiary: Ye Olde Creature Catalogue, and I was tasked with updating the wily Decapus. They call it a Decapus because it has ten arms... and because it lives in trees. Wait... Anyway, the Decapus is one of those monsters that has been around in D&D for a very long time and I was thrilled to get the chance to update it. This is how the final tentacled beast turned out...

Decapus

There were some classic characteristics that I had to adhere to, but other then that the description was rather open to interpretation and I had a lot of fun making the monster come to life. Here is the drawing for the Decapus as well as a process progression of the painting...

Decapus - Drawing

Decapus - Process Progression

RAWR!