@Ascension: Thanks. There's a lot to learn. I used to be a fairly prolific pencil sketcher and actually turned out some decent stuff - though I had a fair way to go before I would have called myself an "artist". I dropped it all for many, many years and now find myself faced with both an interest and a need to *be* an artist. So, let's see if I can be one...or if I will be forced to hire them.
@PS: Indeed it is. Thanks for the advice. I tried it with an articulated action figure but couldn't get it to pose well enough. I have found my little wooden mannequin now, however, so I should be able to get it going. I also have one of those Stan Lee books about drawing comics. I think heroic fantasy folks should be illustrated heroicly so I'm going to try to take a page from Stan.
Anyhoo. Here are a few scanned pics I drew in the corner of my notebook while on an airplane a couple of months ago. These really are "thumbnails"...probably won't get a lot more detail by clicking them. They depict the House of the Four Winds (Haibianr's local monkery), the Temple of Heaven (sort of associated with HotFW), and my first concept sketch for Huangdi Shi, the Emperor's Stone. The first two will get turned into paintings as I go. [edit]Okay, one more. Concept sketches for coinage[/edit]
I'm doing a number of "value sketchs" of various landscapes, many of which will also feature some sort of character action, similar to the Intruder Alert image I posted last time. I'm hoping I can turn these into something that will be useable as a finished illustration. It's a long-shot at this point but I'm just trying to see if I can get values and compositions onto digital paper well enough to tell the story I want to tell.
I was beating myself up about character/NPC paintings until I took a spin through several of my RPG products. Apart from Wayne Reynolds and a couple of other artists I see now that they're really not executed to all that high a level...certainly not photorealistic. I'm going to pick a few styles I like to see if I can emulate their level of quality. I think I just might be able to. Hopefully some posts on that in a few days.
Oh. And maps. Still working on maps.
M
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