Illustrator News: Two Handed Mikey

Two Handed Mikey has a game he illustrated that just came out called Cargo

Check it out!

'Epic Tales' Cover Page Design

Hello, all :) I'm pleased to present to you the final design for the 'Epic Tales' adventure series for Labyrinth Lord. A friend and I are co-conspiratours in a project to be released through my company, Epic Werkes Studio. These adventures will be the forerunner to my own, personal, project. Each cover will feature the same layout, but the colour background will change depending on the image. The images for each adventure will be free to break the bottom and sides of the framed space. The circular region before the book will feature the number of each adventure in the series. My friend is the writer, I am the designer, illustratour, and layout person. So, I am in charge of figuring out the consistent format each adventure will follow. The logo (with the book, but not the banner) will be able to be used, separately, to advertise the product. In some cases, the banner will be present in ads. Currently, the adventure is already written and in the editing process. I have cleaned up the text and made a few changes to the serifs and kerned some of the lettering. I have also transferred the banner and logo and begun painting them. Then, I will set up the layout for the book in Indesign. These are intended to be pdfs, and will be able to be downloaded from RPGNow. I am designing a full front and back cover so that they may be printed in their entirety. This way I can take physical copies to conventions and hand out as promos to gaming stores... Plus, I am not a fan of pdfs. I hate reading things online :P The tentative release date is the end of the Summer. There is lots of work to be done :) I've also included a file of the cover mock-up. It's rough, but it should give you guys an idea of the final design, with the painted logo in place. The logo is in watercolour. The image is an old pic I pulled from some work I did a while ago. It serves only to fill the space and give an glimpse of the final layout with a 'real' image in place.

Map of Lands Unknown

My brother side-tracked me with a request for a map for a Pathfinder game he wants to run for our group. I accepted the challenge, but was a bit dismayed by the fact that, since I'm going to be a player, I couldn't add in all the cool bits, like castles and place names. It's pretty much just an empty map (which he detailed for me beforehand in a rough outline/sketch) so he can fill it in later. My diabolical plan is to make my character a cartographer/wizard/scholar so I can have an excuse to make this "his map" so I can detail it as we discover things >:D muahhahahaahaaa! I had to do something noodly, so I added the neat little ship there in the water. This was also an excuse to try something, making the water a black/negative mass. I'd seen it done in a couple other maps and liked the effect. It makes the other white areas pop. I also had to leave out a lot of detail, which, I think, makes the land features battle with the ship since it's a white shape on a huge black shape, making it dominant by contrast. But that's what you have to do with these things. As the map becomes more detailed through exploration, the land-mass, itself, and its features, will become more dominant through the sheer amount of activity going on due to lettering and further drawing of towns and cities. It was a quick thing that satisfied my world-making urges :P, so I don't feel TOO too (he he, I said tu tu :P) bad about leaving all the noodly stuff out...

Cavern Map Sketch

Here's the sketch for the cavern I'm doing for a mini dungeon for the newsletter. This is an experiment one of the writers and I are doing. He found this contest that some gaming company is doing for people to submit their one page dungeons and we decided to throw it at TAG to see what they thought of the idea. I'm excited. I get to depart from the standard "bird's eye" view that Wiggy likes me to do. I'm going to ink it then watercolour over the inked image. So I have to make sure I'm really careful.

I just attached the final edit after the drawing was reviewed by, and tailoured to, the writer's specifications.