The Host (TFSW #1)

Greetings. 

This is the Host of the Smoking Wyrm, the gleeful chap who welcomes all to his tavern of wicked delectables, and to the DCC zine Tales From The Smoking Wyrm, N'gilken Niarb. 

His name is an anagram (-ish) for our esteemed editor and long time friend, Brian Gilkison. Brian loved the original sketch of this chap when I first shared my sketchbook images to the Wyrm crew. The sketch was done around 2001 or 2002 while I was a player going through the D&D Adventure Series.  I used to make sketches during the session to illustrate what Charlie, our DM, was describing to us. In one of the adventures we encountered a Mindflayer who was a rather nasty fellow. I drew this surprisingly tight sketch of him:

Photo of the original sketch.

I showed it to the Wyrm guys and suggested to them that we use him as a host for every issue not unlike the Cryptkeeper from Tales From The Crypt, or Vampirella, or Tharg from 2000 A.D., or the Watcher from What If? etc. They liked this idea, but for proprietary reasons he couldn't actually be a Mindflayer. So we went with "Cthulu Cultist" for what he officially is. The key to maintaining this is that his hood will never be lowered, so we'll only ever see a gleaming eye or two and a few tentacles emerging from the shrouded shadow of his hood. I tweaked the drawing subtly, inverted it, and presto we have our host!

Close-up of zip on the tentacles.

The tentacles, and any of his exposed skin, are done by using a zipatone with graphic white highlight. This looks good in black and white and is also effective with colored. Speaking of which...

Color piece, a gift to Brian.

Here he is in color! I did this as a gift for Brian Gilkison, one of our esteemed editors at Blind Visionary, since he asked to buy the original but I am not currently selling originals. I felt a bit bad about that since N'gilken Niarb is a sort of anagram of his name, I went ahead and did a color version of this piece. I started off with applying and ink wash (see the first illustration above) then colored over that using Dr P.H. Martins Transparent Watercolors. He was quite excited to receive this from what I heard however not before the Blind Visionary guys made some scans of it to use for promotional purposes. I believe it was used on a Kickstarter or two already. 

Photo of finished piece, as used in Tales From The Smoking Wyrm #1. 

So there you have it: N'gilken Niarb. This is the first of many drawings I have done so far of this guy. Definitely more to come.