New Ice Dragon Battle Illustration and a Centaur!

Today I am very pleased to be able to share a new illustration from the secret "Project Dino-Riders" series I've been working on.  It features viking warriors, frost dragons, witches, and wintery mountain landscape. What's not to love??? 

I had a lot of fun with the narrative elements in this one. In the illustration, I wanted to show what happened before, what is happening now, and what is likely to happen in the moments to follow. Most of this narrative work is taken care of by the vikings frozen in ice, from whom we get some foreshadowing of what is about to happen to the warriors who still remain. (The Lesson here: You don't bring a knife to a frost dragon fight.)  I always love having the chance to work in these kind of narrative moments.

Next, I have a shot of the underpainting: 

I worked in a somewhat peculiar method for this one. I went right from my initial sketch directly into the painting. However, I didn't just start adding colors. I always prefer to start a painting by establishing the values first (wether it is done in pencil or paint) so here I have started with a digital underpainting. Since I planned to eventually paint the entire image opaquely, I focused purely on value here, without concern about wether it looked digital or not.  I used smooth, fast marker brushes for this which helped me move very quickly through this stage.

Looking back after having finished the image (always do a post-mortem!) I am very pleased with this new kind of underpainting. I still love working over a finished drawing and highly textured underpainting, (and still think there is value in being forced to slow down) but I really enjoyed this method of value shaping in digital for how fast it allows me to dive right into the meat of the painting. 

Lastly today, here is a shot of our recent Fanstratics creature: "The Elfin Centaur"

You can check out the VOD of this in last week's Twitch stream if you'd like to watch it develop in real time. 

Also, here is a shot of the digital sketch before-hand. In it you can see that he was initially a bit top-heavy, and we scaled that back to make him a bit more beefy overall. 

I had also hoped to have a shot of our #LETSDRAWMONSTERS creature for the month ready to share with you. But I have decided to take it slow on that one. I am really liking how the full painting is turning out so I don't want to rush it. We will be working to finish that one live on Twitch this week. If you'd like to check it out we will be live today at 10AM EST (And hopefully Friday at 10AM EST as well).  So you can expect a hi-res of that image next time! 

-jg