Shadowcore: Lord of the Rings

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!

September 6, 2012

LoTR Battle of Lake-Town

A while back I was tasked with designing and illustrating the great old red dragon Smaug for Fantasy Flight's Lord of the Rings card game. This was something I was very excited about and knew there was a long line of artist before me that have depicted this most iconic dragon. After creating the first couple illustrations I thought I was done... turns out FFG had bigger things in mind for Smaug and for me. FFG was putting together a Gen Con 2012 LotR adventure deck and they wanted me back to make with some more Smaugs. I was really happy to have a chance to flesh out my original designs and to have a chance to work on something unique like the con deck. Here are how the pieces for the Gen Con 2012 deck turned out...

The Burning of Lake-Town #1 (Smaug the Terrible)

The Burning of Lake-Town #2 (Smaug the Magnificent)

The Burning of Lake-Town #3 (Smaug the Mighty)

These were actually the first pieces that I tried out a new method of building up my paintings. I have been using this method ever since and I am really happy with the affect it is having on the finished pieces. I plan to go into more detail over on my personal blog at a later date, but I am sharing a step by step progression image here first! If you are familiar with similar images I have posted before you will see some marked differences in the first 5 steps...

The Burning of Lake-Town #1 - Process

Since this is a card game there is a tangible end product. Going into this project and several other similar projects I have been designing the art to serve two purposes... One: provide art the client needs, Two: provide art that I want to make and have. You will notice that the final cards crop a lot off of the originals, but they were designed for that. I like a much wider rectangular compositions that a square just won't provide. Also, by creating an image that I am much happier with I am more likely to give it that extra effort to make both the client and myself something really nice. Enough blathering... here are those cards...

RAWR!