Airship Battles and Behind-the-Scenes Previews

This month I have a painting of some glorious aerial mayhem for you! It is a cover for a tabletop game featuring airships and sky islands. (I will link it here when it goes live.) The cover was a ton of fun to paint, especially the explosions, which I feel like I just never can get enough of!

The process was pencil and digital, and it moved along much like my other paintings, using the "Cycle Method" I've described in my previous tutorials, slowly building up layers of light then color over the drawing, adding detail with each new layer.

Apart from that, I have been quiet for a few weeks while I caught up on NDA client work. This weekend has been my first break and I've finally had a chance to dive back into my own projects again. First, I've been drawing the chapter openers for the Martian of the Month sketchbook, which will feature little narrative moments within the world:

I am mostly just having fun with these at the moment, exploring the ideas and seeing what sticks. I want to workshop the above image a bit more, add some more obvious signs of decay and destruction, maybe some spray painted "DO NOT OPEN" across the glass, maybe make the doors more "door-ish", or add window bays, to make it more clear that these are locked glass security doors that our treasure-hunting spaceman is about to hot-wire open.

The intermediate drawing is the hardest part of illustration for me, and the part I always face the most internal resistance to doing. It can be torment at times. The "intermediate drawing" is the one in between my rough sketches (shown above) and the final, tight drawing, and it is always riddled with errors in proportion and perspective and unrefined ideas. This stage always feels like real WORK. Rough sketches are so free and fun! There are no consequences yet, no wrong answers and you don't have to worry about anything except the pure idea. It's like being a kid again! ...But you can't paint over the rough sketch. There are too many errors! You need to refine that rough sketch into a working design through an intermediate drawing, and that process (for me) is often very demoralizing. It is also extremely important; I want to get any mistakes ironed out HERE, rather than be wrestling with them in the final illustration.

If I take this illustration further, it will be by redrawing it as a tight drawing, adding in those ideas described above, to help it communicate its story more effectively. Hopefully I'll have more to share later this month...

In the meantime, another project I am working on is one Annie and I have quietly been developing. I have a concept art post on it going up tomorrow and will share several of the early character design sketches for it!