D&D 5e T-shirt

 This was a Dungeons and Dragons T-shirt design for WeLoveFine. The 5-headed dragon Tiamat is a classic DnD villain and is prominent in the 5th addition adventures under the Tyranny of Dragons storyline. Each of the five heads is a different type of dragon, with different elemental breath attacks, so that's why the heads aren't identical.

Initial design sketches

Black and White value sketching

final layout mock

Pulp Art

Misogynistic? Definitely. Pulp magazines were sensational and had a bad reputation for things like misogyny. This is a piece for two competitions: a challenge at TheArtOrder.com (deadline this weekend) and for an open call for a Comic and  Fantasy Art Exhibition that opens April 14, 2012 in conjunction with C2E2: Chicago's Comic Convention, and the exhibition runs for 3 months.  I got a lot of very helpful feedback from the good folks over at WIPNation (much of them are also industry professionals). I worked on this every Saturday since Dec 23 2011, and will probably continue until the deadline in April.


I've always wanted to do a pulp magazine painting so this challenge was very exciting for me. I also used this as a piece of self expression to deal with emotional turmoil I've been tortured by for a while. Catharsis is a pretty good word I would use for this experience. It helped briefly, but I think ended up being more of a reminder of painful memories and emotions.


Pulp magazines in the horror genre were also called Weird Menace Pulps, Terror Pulps, and Shudder Pulps. Hence the title. For the text I originally had references to Shakespeare's Macbeth and William Blake's The Tyger. Some of the original text ideas were:
"Of direst cruelty"
"the sticking-place"
"Life's but a walking shadow"
But I decided on something different because I realized that Macbeth and Blake didn't fit too well in pulp fiction. The final text that I went with had  deeper meaning to me personally.
Lastly, HP Lovecraft sometimes used a pseudonym 'Humphrey Littlewit', I assume to be nonthreatening to the reader and to make them assume the writer lacked wit. I'd classify HPL as a pulp author so I wanted to reference him somewhere in the painting. I've sometimes been described as barbaric so 'Lilltetact' worked well for me.

Art Evolution Challenge

I'm looking for feedback on my current art project. Please give critique, even if it's only one sentence.


The winner of this competition will be featured in Black Gate, a magazine of sci-fi and fantasy which had a project called Art Evolution: The Visual Development of Art in Role-Playing from 1979-2009. This was 25 of the RPG industries most established artists illustrating the same character, Lyssa, in their own unique style and genre. The only reference was, "A young female human wizard with black hair who always wears white trimmed in gold."


Now there's a chance for up and coming artists to take their shot at Lyssa, called Art Evolution: The Next Stage. 5 winners will be featured in Black Gate next to the "greatest artistic RPG talents of all time."


The runes on the floor are in Draconic from D&D 4e, and they say "thewillowen.com". The runes on her ribbons coming from her waist are brushes from Obsidiandawn.com. In the center of the magic circle on the floor is a design of a 20-sided die.

I made sure she was stacked with magic items so she would look like she could fit right into a game of D&D. Magic ring, necklace, cloak, staff, scrolls, magic potions, a key on a chain, and a dagger (behind her hip). In the first colored iteration I gave Lyssa a staff from Adventurer's Vault 2, but then I went back to my original version of the staff because the new one wasn't reading very well. On her head is the Chimera Headdress also from AV2. 
At first I was hesitant to make her book the Necronomicon from Army of Darkness, because it's a pretty evil book and it doesn't really fit that well with her because she doesn't look that evil. But then I decided, "to hell with it, I'm gonna draw what I want to draw."


Inspiration and influences: Michael Turner, Ben Wootten, Shadowcat, Nightcrawler, Army of Darkness, and all of the other entries in the competition.


This piece is dedicated to Adam Adamowicz, rest in peace.


[Update] Winners can be viewed here: http://theartorder.com/2012/02/27/art-evolution-judging/#more-1778
126 entries. 5 winners, 5 honorable mentions. They're all professionals and even veteran artists, so I don't feel too bad losing to them.