D&D Core Books

The new core books for D&D's 5th edition have just been announced and I had the opportunity to paint a couple of them.  Let's just say I couldn't say yes fast enough when I received the request. Talk about a once in a lifetime opportunity!!

The first one I was given was the Player's Handbook.  The original image was cropped down a bit for the final cover.  I don't always like when this happens but it is part of the process and typically why many ADs ask for lots of bleed on the image.  Ultimately I think it turned out really nice with the tight crop.

The Player's Handbook (Uncropped)

Final Print Version

The second one commissioned, only about a couple months ago, was the Dungeon Master's Guide.  This time around we anticipated a close crop and I painted the image for that specifically.

Dungeon Master's Guide

Final Print Version

I was truly honored to get to work on two of the core books for the next installment of D&D.  Big thanks to the ADs, Melissa and Shauna for these two paintings.

Jeff LaSala wrote a great article over at Tor discussing what D&D has instore with 5th edition.  We had a little chat about the covers I painted.  Check it out here

The Year of The Sundering

For a good amount of 2013 (and some of 2012) I created a series of character focused images for D&D's Sundering Campaign. A lot of this imagery has finally been hitting the shelves in the past few months for D&D's Sundering Adventures.  A while back I did a couple posts on the two major character posters for the Sundering announcements. Head on back and check them out. The Sundering announcement. The Sundering Campaign key art.

I wanted to show how the packaging came into play on these pieces because I don't often get to see the final result until well after these items are in stores.  The graphic design work and logo placement on all these really made them come to life. One thing to note is that a lot of the time, especially on covers like this, a good amount of the work will get covered up or cropped out. The client will ask for that extra bleed so that they have a good amount of space to work with for placement.

Each booklet for these adventures contained foldouts highlighting the characters.  This meant all the characters need to be fully painted and on their own layers in the final file.  Here is how some of that looked.

This was a really great set of pieces to work on with lots of fun and interesting characters to develop.  I really had a blast and its great to finally see them all in print. 

I should have a few more things relating to the Sundering around the corner so stay tuned.