Dor Nyvs images 1 & 2

Dor Nyvs* is a new Elemental Patreon for DCC cooked by Trevor Stamper and the Blind Visionary team. This article appears in Tales From The Smoking Wyrm #3. This particular project gave me a wellspring of ideas. It was such a strong concept that it was easy enough to come up with some interesting visuals to enhance this article with. In the end we chose three for me to draw up. I will talk about the first two now.. The first one was a large piece with an acolyte of Dor Nyvs summoning some earthy elemental minions out of the ground.  I can't deny that the elementals are vaguely inspired by the early Kirby issues of the Fantastic Four, particularly his renditions of some of the Mole Man's minions.  

The penciled page. 

On the same sheet of paper I did a smaller piece featuring just these elementals emerging from the ground. This was intended to be a banner image to go at the bottom of a page or where ever the Wyrm team wanted to stick it. They're assortment of critters and they cover a range of minor earth elemental possibilities. 

*Pronounced as DOOR niv US. 

The Host returns (TFTSW #2)

 Hello. Been a good minute since I updated this blog hasn't It? The well is far from dry for things I can show you. And I return with the return of the host of Tales From The Smoking Wyrm himself,  N'gilken Niarb.  I say it's his return because it was his 2nd appearance in TFTSW and the 2nd illustration I had done of him. 

N'gilken Niarb returns.

As you can see our host has a drink to serve to someone and he has also caught a mysterious cat-like creature. This thing is called a tentacular, and the Wyrm team had been working on the article and overall design of that thing since before the first issue had gone to press. I snuck one into an illustration for the first issue, and here is another preview of it. Trevor, who writes the intro dialog for Niarb for every issue, had a blast writing  this soft introduction for the tentacular which would appear in all it's monstrous glory on the cover of issue 3. 

If I recall, this illustration was done fairly fast and somewhat at the last minute. In the original brief I had been instructed to draw him standing under  the Smoking Wyrm sign, which is why in the original artwork the sign is penciled in above him.  It still begs me to ink it everytine I see it!

 

The ghost sign of the Wyrm?

This drawing is smaller in size to the original illustration of N'gilken Niarb despite having far more detail. Issue two was a problematic issue for all of us. And I disliked how many of my pieces in it appeared in print. This piece in particular just felt 'muddy' to me when I held the issue in my hand, and I look back on it less fondly than the others. But here in hindsight, and with proper scans, I think I have been too harsh on this piece, and think it holds up alright.

Alrighty, here's a bit of a bonus for you; 

The full page

The original illustration contains more art. The clip art for the pointing fingers that are going to appear in Blind Visionary products and a phantom. I am not sure if any of those have been printed yet or ever will be.  The pointing fingers are called manicules, which are typographic marks that appear like a hand with it's index finger extended in a pointing gesture. They still get use today and I see them on junk mail all the time. The guys at Blind Visionary want to bring them back to their fullest potential, so look for them in their products. Who knows, you might even spot one of these! 

Cthulu Cathedral (TFSW #3)

This is the piece from Tales From The Smoking Wyrm #2 that, despite the detail, took little time for me to illustrate. Looking back on it critically, yeah, I could've done better, but it came out good considering the deadline crunch I was under. Ironically, COVID-19 would delay getting issue 2 printed so we could've spent more time on it in hindsight, but it is what it is. I made the deadline and Trevor was more than happy with the results.

Finished illustration.

Trevor's original brief was simple: draw a Cthulu cathedral.  He sent me a few photos for reference. I immediately settled on the perspective that I wanted and borrowed elements, albeit simplified, from his reference photos for the initial sketch. 

Concept sketch.

I know I wanted a messianic-like figure to lead the congregation, and I knew this figure would be mostly obscured in shadow. Originally I thought about making the alter itself to be some sort of fleshy mutation thing, but with the way the light sources were going to work in this I realized it was going to make that area of the piece way busier than I needed it to be. So I saved that alter for maybe something in the future...

Priest and alter. 

After I was pleased with the concept I sent it over andTrevor loved it.  That sketch was the basis for the main drawing. I ruled out the perspective on the bristol board and began filling in details. 

Pencils.

I was worried that I would botch this at some stage so I took scans at various steps along the way as a back up plan. 

I had a lot of ruler work on this one as it's a complex perspective drawing that required a strict attention to those details. 

The stain glass window was a simple drawing. I had intended to do more with them but I decided they might get lost in the details so I kept them as simple line art. I think that turned out to be a good decision in the end.

The shadows on the bricks on the background were crucial in making the key points of the drawing 'pop out'. I wanted that contrast to add an element of three-dimensionality to the piece as we well as to make the arching energy seem as bright and illuminating as I could without washing out the other details. 

When this was published it was reversed, even though I intended this piece to "read" from right to left it still worked. Some of the text copy covered up a lot of the columns (which was intended by design) but I still get a kick out of including details that the casual reader of Tales Of The Smoking Wyrm might never catch. In this case, if you look at the columns there are eyes on each one that are waking up as the energy crackles by. This was Trevor's idea and I thought it was a creepy and subtle effect to illustrate. 

All-in-all, this is one I like a lot and maybe it would be fun to revisit this idea as an acrylic painting at some point. 

Tales From The Smoking Wyrm #5 cover.

 Tales From The Smoking Wyrm #5! 

With the launch of the Kickstarter for Tales From The Smoking Wyrm #5 this image has finally been revealed to the world.  And I am going to talk about it a bit more here. 

Final inked piece.

This is the third cover in a series of narrative covers that basically started with issue #3. That cover had the Beastmaster and the Dwarven Jaeger drinking on the front steps of The Smoking Wyrm while a sinister tentacular decended from above along with a countless mass of it's young. The cover of #4, by Brian Maikisch, showed the interior of the Wyrm and through the window you could see the Beastmaster being hoisted up in the air while the Dwarf Jaeger tries in vain to keep her grounded. Sadly this may not be too obvious in the covers final form as Brian Maikisch reduced the size of the window to accommodate the logo for the cover, but there's enough happening there to sort of make out what's happening. 

Original window for #4, by Brian Maikisch.

Trevor wanted the cover of #5 to have a perspective looking down from the rooftop of Wyrm with a view of the building across the street. He wanted the slug-guy to be seen as the heroes struggle against the tentacular. I toyed around with the some layouts but none of them made interesting covers to me. I decided on a layout that would have four planes to it and would move the viewer's eye in a way that would tell a story. 

Concept sketch.

The first plane, and most obvious would be a close up of the Beastmaster herself stabbing into the tentacle that holds her with a knife. The 2nd plane would be lower down as we see the wolf and Dwarf fending off another one of the tentacles. The third plane will have the mage blasting a way a large group of tentacular young while the slug guy and pointing lady from the cover of #1 look on. And the 4th plane shows the city guard arriving to intervene. 

Final pencils.

I added the mage from the cover of #1 since I have only drawn him twice before and felt like he was overdue to reappear. I added in the pointing lady from the cover of #1 also. 

Color piece #1.

 

The color I had visualized for this as I drew it was red. I wanted the foreground character to we washed in a red light with the energy bolt from the mage to be in a constasting color. With each of the Kickstarters of an issue that features my cover art, I do a small series of unique full-sized hand colored replicas for lucky fans to purchase. It was the perfect opportunity to experiment a bit with color. These are all done using Dr. P.H. Martins Translucent Watercolors, or dyes as we referred to them in art school. 

I decided upon completion that the red was a bit too harsh so I went in the opposite direction with the 2nd piece, I decided to go cool color against a hot color background. 

Piece #2

I really liked how this one turned out and the cool and hot color clashing really brings the image to life, at least to my eye. I decided to color saturate the background a bit more for next piece though.

Piece #3.

I loved how this one came out and I think it's my favorite one. But I had more to do so I kept up the experiments. 

Piece #4. 

For the 4th on I wanted to reduce the colors to be primarily yellow and blue with greens being formed from a blending of the them. I was pleased with this one as well, but I decided I had exhausted the extreme cast lighting experiments of the previous pieces. 

Piece #5

I wanted to base this one off of the covers used for #3 as a sort of continuity between that cover and this one. The almost solid purple hue of the background really makes the foreground character pop out a bit more. 

Piece #6.

Finally the last piece is a bit of a union of ideas from the some of the former ones. I think if has a nice balance to it that appeals to me.  I hope you enjoyed this, and I hope these sell, but I hope these are all appealing enough to cause a bit of indecision to the first few backers as they struggle to decide which ones to select!  

Also, I must note, that the scans I have seen online aren't as true to the real life images as you see here. These color images are photos, where the ones on the Kickstarter and the Goodman Games website are scans. Neither the photos nor the scans are as intense to the eye as the actual real life pieces.

(C) 2022 Blind Visionary.

Dwarven Jager

 This is the Dwarven Jager, a new class for Dungeon Crawl Classics as featured in Tales From The Smoking Wyrm #2. This is one of my favorites since my "art revival" began in 2019. I really enjoy drawing this chap. He's got this odd Kirby-esque large scaled armor, two simple axes, Hagar The Horrible like-helm, and creepy eyes. He's totally fun to draw and I have, so far, included him on all of the covers that I have done for the 'Wyrm. And he's been in some of the interior illustrations as well.

What differentiates him from the typical fantasy Dwarf I might tend to draw (re: Scum from Onward Retainer) is that he doesn't have a belly. This guy is somewhat fit for your typical fantasy dwarf!

Pencils.

Brian Gilkison, one of the writers and editors on the Smoking Wyrm named him Marrek.  I gave him the sir name of Ironbite. So, here is the preliminary inks on Marrek Ironbite:

Half_way inked. 

Most the inks were done using a dip ink pen for the heavy lines and a crowquil on the smaller lines. 

This piece appeared in Tales From The Smoking Wyrm #2. He's a fun guy to draw and I like to include him in as many scenes as I can. You'll see him again in the upcoming Kickstarter on the cover of Tales From The Smoking Wyrm #5.  

Telekinetic Rat (TFTSW #1)

 One of the first things that the Wyrm crew asked me to illustrate was an example of a Telekinetic Rat. Sounded fun to me, so after a quick bit of research, I got started on designing this rat. 

Finished color piece.

My natural place to start any piece is in my sketchbook. After a few doodles and minor studies I came up with this. I showed the Wyrm guys who all seemed to dig it and it was decided that this would become the illustration. 

 Sketchbook rough drawing.

After transferring it to bristol board, it was time to define this rat with some inks. I used a brush, a Hunt 107 nib and a crowquil for this task.

Ink work in progress.

The scroll was a just an abstract doodle up to this point as I wasn't 100% sold on it. So I left it vague. But the time came to make the final decision and I kept with the scroll idea.

Finished inks on the rat. 

I knew when I sketched this piece that I wanted him interacting with a scroll. I had recently rediscovered a collection of old Warlock magazines from the '80's. It was a magazine dedicated to supporting the Ian Livingston and Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy game books that were really popular in the UK at the time. The art was fantastic, and amazingly drawn. A lot of these artists also worked for GW (in fact GW took over the publication of Warlock in the later half of it's run) and were still producing work for them by the time Rogue Trader was launched on the world in '87.  That brilliant art work included drawings of maps, scrolls, tattered books and evil grimoires. It's inspiring stuff and they inspired me to attempt a scroll in that style for this illustration. 

Finished black and white 

Note the wax seal; it has the stylized insignia of T.S.G. imprinted upon it. This was an alias for Trevor Stamper, the publisher of Tales From The Smoking Wyrm, which he has used off and on since out High School days.  When this piece was published in the zine it was flip-floped but Trevor made sure that TSG logo was kept in the original orientation. 

Hi quality scan finale. 

As for the final color version in the first pic above, that was done as an experiment. A warm-up for getting back into coloring again with P.H. Martin dyes. The pink energy is a call-back to the days when the Simonson's worked on Marvel's X-Factor comic in the late '80s. Jean Gray's powers were often shown as manifesting in a color like this. However lay folk look upon this and think that the rat is being shot in the head... sometimes in art you win...*sigh*.  I since stuck this rat into quite a few different illustrations and I have been sure to alter this manifestation to look a bit less... explosive. 

Send Forth the Shoggoth (TFtSW #2)

 

This piece appeared, albeit cropped, in Tales From The Smoking Wyrm #2. I was asked to make this a double-page spread, which was great as it allowed me to throw in all sorts of detail. The sketch that this was drawn from was done around 2001. It was intended for a  Spelljammer D&D 3e conversion project that a guy was doing online. But that idea died on the vine but not before a friend and local artist James Cox and myself managed to produce a few drawings for it together. This one was never finished and it was chosen from my sketchbook by the Wyrm team. I updated it but decided to keep the Spelljammer theme alive (subtly of course). 

Early pencils.

I added the Necromancer that I drew for issue #1 urging his pet... thing... to stop the robbers that raided his ship. I like repeating characters throughout  the drawings I do for TftSW as I think the continuity is fun for the readers. Also it's easier on me as I don't have to design a new character each time I set about doing an illustration. Sadly he had to be cropped as space restrictions ment that this piece had to be reduced down to a half page illustration. 

Fully penciled in.

Also reappearing the Dwarf Jaeger from the cover of Tales Of The Smoking Wyrm #1 as well as the Telekinetic Rat also on that cover and featured within issue 1. The halfing thief will reappear in a future issue (#5 tentatively). 

Early stages of inks.

Later stages of inks.

So here it (the first pic in this post), for your viewing pleasure, in it's uncropped form. Enjoy. 

The mostly done stage.