Happy New Year!

Had a little time for doodling this afternoon. I've always wanted to sketch my own version of a Chinese Dragon. Now I just want to create more.

Tonight ends the year of the rabbit and begins the year of the dragon —the luckiest symbol of the zodiac. In Chinese tradition, dragons are charismatic, aggressive and succeed at everything they do.

almost everything.

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Update Jan 23, 15:26

Typically, when I post, I put art up and then move on, but in the spirit of fun, I've decided to make this an ongoing project and continue posting dragon sketches until Chinese New Year ends on Feb 6. —or until I get tired.

Jan. 26

Christina's dragons are sweet and cuddly, Justin's are strong and awesome. Mine are cynical curmudgeons. Hmmmm.

Vectour Dragon

Here's my vectour dragon illustration :P I updated the dragon, dropping the opacity on the scales, wing bones, and knee swirl. I also reduced the stroke size on the smoke and dropped its opacity. This also did wonders! Thanks, Chuck! :)

Prodigal Son

Hey, guys,

It was brought to my attention that I was absent for a long time, and people noticed it :P Very kind of you. I've just been super busy. I have a couple big commissions, on top of a busy next couple of weeks preparing some new pieces for a portfolio to pitch to a Connecticut-based company called, Melissa and Doug.

I AM working on my own stuff, too. I have several pieces for you guys, actually. Some old school, some new for me.

The character sheets are from the book my friend and I are making. We actually have a publisher, now, who can market us broaden our customer base. This is going to be one kick ass product, guys. No joke. I can't wait to finish it! These characters are hand-drawn and inked, then plunked into the character sheet format (that was also hand-drawn and inked) using Photoshop. I wanted these to feel like old school character sheets, with a bit of a twist. Going for nostalgia, here :)

The map is from an AD&D campaign world I am preparing adventures for. It's a combination of hand-drawn inking, and colour and parchment effect in Photoshop.

The Woman is the same technique used for the map and will be a portfolio piece for my M&D interview.

Enjoy, folks! And sorry for being away so long. There's been a lot of work from you all, lately :) It all looks so nice. I'll comment when I grab another second. I'm working on a cartoon dragon and princess, today, in Illustratour CS2. When I take a break, I'll look around and write some replies :)

Hairy Potter

Never thought I'd post this, but with Potter-mania in full swing, I just buckled.

This was created for the spring issue of California Magazine. They have a running feature called Twisted Titles where they invite readers to riff on a famous book. Then an illustrator gets to pile on the irreverence some more. I was offered the chance to illustrate Hairy Potter—Hippie Ceramicist, and couldn't resist dragging the movie Ghost into the mud.

Here is another concept with Lord Voldemort as a tiki mug.

(I could have lived with that one too.)

More sketches on the blog.

'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.

The Worst Sketch...

...you may ever see on this blog, is in this post.

It's taken every ounce of humility I've got to post it, but I wanted to respond to Christina's recent posting about the creative process.

The art above is something I did last week for my daughter's birthday. She asked me to make her a drawing with a unicorn and a hamster, and I immediately bristled at the thought of combining two animals so different in scale. Unfortunately, once you tell your 5-year old she can have whatever she wants for her birthday, you're pretty much stuck (In fact, I think that's how John the Baptist died, but I digress.)

Here's the eponymous sketch:

Most of my art starts with a really awful, but useful thumbnail. (Actually some aren't even useful —just awful.) In this case I couldn't stand to look at it long enough to finish it, but it was enough to tell me the concept was okay, and it stood as a rough guide for the work ahead.

After pulling a few images of horses in steeplechases, I got a more refined sketch. You can see that I'm still making decisions about the placement of the front legs. A lot of my rough sketches have three or more limbs.

One the sketch is scanned, I tear the elements apart in Photoshop and nudge them. It's nice to be able to make these refinements without re-tracing the image. I've always found that something gets lost with every iteration.

Here's a cleanup based on the sketch above:

In the final image, I've actually superimposed the cleanup over the early sketch.

I don't use this technique much for my commercial work, because it looks too sketchy for most clients, but I like it for personal stuff. My preliminary work almost always hits these stages though, and I keep most of the nicest sketches. (about 10% of the total)

Greyfox the Wizard and Map of the Wilde

Here're a few more things I've done in my free time. I'm still involved in some projects, so I can't post any of that, but these are things I've been working on on my own. The first is Greyfox the Wizard. The second is a map for a personal project for my AD&D Campaign, "Dragon Slayers." Both images of Greyfox are ideas I have been playing with. One was to see what kinds of positive lines and shapes I could make in contrast to the black shape of his cloak. My first idea was to use a large, flat black shape to describe his garments, letting his skin be pure white to contrast with the black. I also wanted to create an area of intense simplicity to make the character in the foreground stand out and compliment the busy quality of the background. So here are both solutions. Please give me your input on which works. I am fascinated with large areas of graphic shaping. I have been since I can remember. My struggle has been how to describe form with as few lines as possible and experimenting with how to define form with what "isn't" there rather than what is. Optical illusions are fascinating. I think artists are a lot like wizards/illusionists/magicians. Our job is to trick the eye into believing something that isn't real. Using colour and line and what is essentially just pigmented mud, we must convince the audience not to question what they are seeing. That is the trick of a true artist, I think. If the viewer can say, "Psshhh, I could do that!" then the result is seamless enough to trick them into thinking it was effortless in its creation.

Withdrawal...

Man, I need to go to the lunches again, soon. I'll be able to in the next couple of weeks or so. Then I'll be back on a regular basis. Gosh, I'm kinda glad I've been away, it's made me realize how much I appreciate all you guys and what you give me. So, "thanks" to everyone. You're all awesome! :)

Justin

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...

Some Sketches

Hey, guys, I've been kinda sporadic in my internet usage lately. I've also been short of funds, hence my lack of attendance at the meetings. I'll be coming back regularly soon. This is such a great community, you guys are all so awesome.

To fill you all in, since I've not been at the meetings much lately:

I have two jobs currently that are right in the direction I want to go in. A guy I met through the Celtic Myth Podshow, a writer, has been in regular correspondence with me over the past year and a half. We've been planning a dummy book and some images for a picture book that will precede a longer epic narrative. It's a more adult story that functions as a Childrens' Book, as well. The images here are some of the sketches I've done for character design. I'll only post a few since I don't want to give too much away :P

A woman called me out of the blue the other day offering me some work for a book she's working on, a fantasy. She lives in Texas and saw me from my website, which is the first job I've received from my website... AWESOME! :) It's a fantasy she's writing, which is excellent, and her message is one I very much believe in. She wants me to do some concept work for her. These are such great opportunities and they're coming at a really good time for me.

Hope you're all doing very well :)

J.

Sea Serpent Sketch

Here's a monster I'm working on for the newsletter. If you guys haven't seen the map I did for TAG, go here: http://www.justinrussellart.com/RassilonMap.htm. Apparently, somebody emailed my boss and asked which monster that was (on the far right), specifically :P It doesn't exist in the bestiary, so for my monster this month I'm making the thing an "offical" monster of Hellfrost. This will be rendered in my usual bestiary style, graphite. However, I plan on using some new techniques I picked up since working on the aforementioned book. Any criticisms are welcome. It's not due till the end of the month. If you haven't seen any of my bestiary drawings, I've sampled a few here on the blog and on my website. Just click the next buttons left or right to navigate to them on my website. You shouldn't have to go far.

This image is (c) Triple Ace Games, 2010.

Conversation in a Tide Pool

A warm-up sketch before I started working this morning. Man, I'm writing A LOT lately and this still helped me loosen up! It was amazing. I'd started it as a very rough idea a few days ago and got the urge to finish it more last night. I'd like to paint this, too. Maybe add more designy things to the rocks and stuff. Might be a faerie-tale or story in the making as well. Not sure.

Here's another sketch, a variant I was working on over the last day or so when I had the time.

Chuck, talk about variations in Mermaids. Look at this "Mummified Mermaid." Very inspiring, kinda gross :P but interesting.

Monsters of Slatt's

Man, my juices got going, which was cool, because I've gotta get into Monster Mode here shortly for some articles for TAG.

This is a quick sketch of a dragon inspired by a pic from a regular Facebook posting from the Zoo. Monitours are so cool. The blue one was the coolest. This is just a baby :P Still has its egg horn and everything. Judging from the bone, probably about 3 1/2' long.

Scultpure Links

Here are several faerie/doll sculptours of various styles:

Fairy Woodland
www.fairywoodland.com

Fantasiation
www.fantasiation.com

Angela Giovanna Loroux (her stuff was really cool)
www.lorouxgallery.com

Faerie Glen
www.faerieglennj.com

Inner Fae Creations
www.innerfaecreations.com

Renae Taylor
www.renaetaylor.biz

Hope you guys find some inspiration here. Some of it is very whimsical. These were some great conversations. The Fantasiation lady was very interesting. Very animated, she was great.