"The Dragonslayers" Hi-Res Drawings and Color comps

Today I have some drawings and previews for you for some upcoming traditionally painted work I have on the easel right now. The first is "the Dragonslayers" for the Dungeon Master Series, which I will be painting in watercolor starting next week. Above is the very simple color comp, and below is the tight drawing. We went through a LOT of iterations on the drawing during our Twitch streams, and did a lot of workshopping on the characters. We primarily focused on the hostess, who is taking our adventurers orders at this medieval equivalent of a Waffle House, on the morning after their adventure. There was something wrong with her, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it while sketching out the first pass.

To fix the issue I pulled out some tracing paper and did some exploratory revisions. (I highly recommend this for fixing a drawing!) For anyone wondering how she ended up, here is the revised sketch version:

There was a lot of calls in the chat for a younger, starry-eyed beer-maiden version of the character. While that might have been fun; this world-weary old lady, with her expression of, "That's the third dragon head this week. Now can I have your order?" really keeps the illustration grounded. Her new pose says she's working 3 jobs and has 9 other tables and doesn't have time for this. I think it brings everything back to reality in a fun way, and without this tired old lady keeping us in check society collapses under the sheer weight of our collective delusional narcissism. So I'm keeping her!

However, the chat was RIGHT that her floor-length dress and stilted pose being the wrong call, so we sketched out a more sensible skirt here, along with an empty coffee pot, a soup ladle, money pouch, better headscarf, and now we show her foot tapping impatiently as she reads back their orders to them. I like this pose WAAAY more, so thank you to everyone who stopped by to give me a hard time about her. I'm really looking forward to diving into this one.

Next, I have an oil painting currently on the easel, this one going back to Tolkien, and Smaug chasing the dwarves out from the Lonely Mountain.

I have shared some of this previously, so the main update today is the transfer sketch onto the panel below. I'll be starting this one very soon as well, and will be doing an underpainting in acrylic ink before diving into oils!

More on these soon!

-jg