Weekly Update - number 10

The weather has started to slightly improve and I could finally just sit and sketch again.  I like having the window open and listening to birds, distant baseball games being played, and the occasional insane person screaming in the middle of the street.  This week had all three.  Just life as usual around this neighborhood!

As a side project outside of doing a steady stream of rpg-work on commission I've been thinking of re-skinning some of the more esoteric 'D&D' creatures.  It wasn't something I was going to share much about, since it's not strictly about my world or the stories I'm doing, but this week's 'critter' did have a bit to do with a story I'm developing so I figured I'd put it up for viewing here.

I admit that I've never really liked the look of 'mind flayers' (or Illithids) through the years.  I couldn't quite put my finger on what exactly it was that bothered me about them until recently.  It was largely the fact that the squid/octopus-head didn't really convey a sense of fear to me.

I had recently seen a picture of a large painted skull that had tentacles posted by someone from.. I think it was the SDCC show.  Sadly I don't know who to credit with the inspiration for this, but I knew that it was precisely what I wanted to base the mind-flayer-ish creatures of Felwroth.

I think it was the late H.R. Giger that noted years back that part of why the alien in the Alien movie was so terrifying was that it didn't have eyes.  There is something very human about eyes and the expressions they can convey.  They allow connection and empathy.  Things without visible eyes are slightly alien to us, or unsettling.  I decided a creature that is so psychically endowed and lived under the crust of the world didn't need eyes to hunt with.  They feed off of memory and fear and project fields of psionic energy to make very detailed 'maps' in their minds about areas they are travelling through.

I also liked the more skull-based head, allowing for a bit of a humanistic approach but in a more death-like vein, even if these creatures aren't necessarily undead themselves.

I might end up scribbling out some of their territory as well.  The biggest challenge is figuring out what creatures like this would have in way of homes and tools when much of their aesthetic isn't based on the visual, but mental.

Other art news

I'm starting to do initial colours on the last image I posted of Cinders.  I'm thinking of upping the dpi of images for the $10/tier to 300dpi.  It's hard to come up with really good rewards for each tier when it's based on such an ethereal thing as art.

One thought was to start posting 'process' shots for images.  Essentially a look into how I go about going from initial sketches to finished painting.  I was hoping to do record the process and make them available for download, but editing software is either 'clunky' at the free end of the spectrum, or insanely expensive at the other end, so showing individual process shots might be a better way to go about it.

The commission-work I'm doing for the upcoming Heroes of Morhost has been extended a couple months as well, meaning my schedule suddenly got a little more packed beyond August.  I'm still managing to keep up with other projects however, including monthly sketches, a painting or two for Patrons, the comic work (still hoping to get some finished pages to post when I can), as well as sketches intermixed throughout.

I might be extending the theme of each month to a theme ever two or three months since it seems a month is too short a time to really show off all of what I had in mind on one subject.  An example was doing more on the Javarran (wolf people) culture since I only showed a fraction of what their lives were actually like (even if there was a lovely pin-up of a she-wolf included).

I'm going through my catalog of art as well, and will be posting both scaled low-resolution versions, and high resolution images of older artwork I've done as well.  These will be posted in large chunks to avoid spamming everyone with hundreds of individual posts.

If there's anything you all would like to see that I can reasonably provide, I'll be glad for the feedback!

-T.J.