Another character portrait from our new Ars Magica campaign, really fun to paint.
Archive for the 'Drawings' Category
We started a new Ars Magica game with our gaming group, and I’ve been having fun drawing the characters.
So here’s the last one of the series for now. I ended up really liking doing these and now I feel a little bit sad about stopping. This time I used brush for the background, mainly to make making all those black bearable. I’m not quite satisfied with the background, even tho I feel I spent ages at it, I think it could have been more readable overall. I like the brush too, I just don’t feel I have total control over it. Maybe if I went for a bigger paper size. I still like this piece overall, the concept of piles and piles of treasure is just too fun. If this as a digital painting I would probably have been adding stuff endlessly and it would have taken ages to finish. Still, doing a background like this for a game would be awesome. And I love shiny plates in ink.
I’m really happy with this one, tho I did kind of draw myself into a corner here. More forward planning next time. I’ve kept using thin pens for character details and brush pen for background and thickening the crucial lines. I end up scanning the picture in, looking at it zoomed out, and going back to the original and adding thicker lines to many places to keep the image clearer.
Finally some character interaction (or lack of interaction). I actually really like the problem solving related to these inks, trying to make something simple and easily recognizable and something that’s easy to identify with is so different from making sweeping, dramatic statements with my paintings. But it’s really fun. Many of the drawings I remember from my childhood are ink illustrations, sometimes simple presentation is the most powerful and memorable.
Next image in the Dealing with Dragons-series. I really tried hard to make each princess have a different look and attitude.
Doing these narrative illustrations is a weird experience compared to doing my normal painting, as I’m actually illustrating something literal that is happening, instead of trying to capture something very general. I really like it tho, sometimes simple things are the best.
