mearrin69's art thread...

[mearrin69]

Hi all,
I'm having to school myself on digital painting (a hard subject!) for my current project (for which I'll probably end up hiring some artists, eventually). Figured I'd start a little thread here with some of the stuff I'm puttering around with. Any guidance from artistically inclined forum-goers will be much appreciated.

First up: I'm working on an adventure called Curse of the Emperor's Stone, in which the heroes deal with an insidious "treasure" from the distant past. The image below is my rough sketch (values only, no color yet, though the final will be jade colored if I can manage it) of that eponymous MacGuffin. I've included my reference, found on some old Antiques Roadshow-type of website somewhere. I'm closely matching it here but the final probably will be somewhat different - just trying to get the painting down before I try my hand and designing AND painting.

In the background I'm working on some NPC and pre-gen portraits, landscapes, and action scenes. At this stage they're even rougher than this little gem so I'll just see if I can't whip them into shape before I post.

[edit]Oh, what the heck. I threw on a sketch (rough, rough, rough) of an illustration I might want to include with the Intruder Alert! encounter. There would, ideally, be two ninja-types climbing over the side of the ship in that big open area but I have erased out all of my attempts so far. Needless to say (but I will anyway) this needs lots of refinement. [/edit]

Any feedback is, of course, welcome.
M