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

Posted by Craig J Spearing at 6:49 PM

9 comments:

  1. Tyler JacobsonFebruary 28, 2013 at 7:33 PM

    Excellent work Craig!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adam Danger CookMarch 1, 2013 at 9:19 AM

    Amazing stuff, man. I told you this already, but I love these.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Craig J SpearingMarch 2, 2013 at 5:57 PM

    Thanks guys!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lance RedMarch 3, 2013 at 4:02 PM

    Great illustrations. It is interesting to see the covers broken down to the individual pieces. How do you go about colorizing the grey-scale paintings? Do you have a set process for that step?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mike SassMarch 3, 2013 at 8:10 PM

    good stuff as usual, Craig.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Craig J SpearingMarch 4, 2013 at 1:14 PM

    Thanks again!

    Lance- I convert the image to RGB, duplicate the grayscale layer (keeping it as the background layer for value reference), then apply a 10-20% color filter to the top layer (image→adjustments→photo filter). This adds just a little bit of base color, kinda like a thin wash. After that I use a large brush in color mode to establish the overall palette, then smaller brushes in normal mode to smooth transitions and polish details.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Lance RedMarch 4, 2013 at 8:27 PM

      Thank you so much for answering my question. I was curious to hear because I have been using monochromatic underlays in my painting process too. But when I've went to colorize them I always seemed to lose a lot of the initial values I had established and it feels like I always end up doing all the value work twice. I have not tried messing with brush modes yet, only been changing entire layer modes (mainly color, normal, & multiply). I will have to begin experimenting with brush modes. Thank you for the insight.

      Delete
  7. Christopher BurdettMarch 5, 2013 at 6:36 AM

    Beautiful work at always! So good! :D

    ReplyDelete
  8. EvaMarch 15, 2013 at 9:14 AM

    You rock, Sir!

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)