D&D Tomb of Horrors TPK

Total Party Kill
It took three months, but the party finally met their death halfway through the heroic tier of the Tomb.
How did it happen? We broke our adventuring rules:
1. Never split the party: I faced a losing battle with a large-sized Undead while the others tried to take out medium zombies. In the back of the party the halfing rogue was putting distance between himself and the fray while taking potshots. A large Ivy monster took advantage of the stray halfing and grabbed him. At this point I felt that a retreat could very likely possibility, so I rushed over to release the rogue from the Ivy in preparation for the retreat. That only meant that I was now tangled up with the Ivy monster. The paladin replaced my stand with the giant, and the healer stood between us trying to keep us alive.
2. If a retreat is called, you must follow: Several times we said the word 'retreat,' but for some reason or another, we just kept fighting. There's really no excuse for this.
3. Don't do anything risky: I tried to save the halfling. We all at one point decided to risk our lives and not retreat.

So now that we're all dead and trying to figure out whether to resurrect or roll up new characters, I'm creating a few edits, and vow to enforce the rules more actively.
1. Never split the party.
   a) Focus fire on one target [unless there are multiple ranged enemies]
2. Follow retreat.
   b) Don't hesitate to retreat even if it's just outside the entrance to regroup and try again.
   a) If needed, leave other party members for dead, otherwise you're breaking rule #3.

Oh yeah, there was a 1 square hallway we could've just walked over to, where we wouldn't have had to fight the large creatures.

Kitchen of Terror

Non-disclosure again for this animation. However, I will be updating with promotional stuffs later. You'll get to see my work, just through a filter.

Troll & more work

Started a third project, Kitchen of Terror, which I'm super excited about. It's about anthropomorphized vegetables being cut up and cooked for human consumption.
Also still workin on Scott Washington's Relentless Dungeon, and cranked out another monster art piece today, but still needs a few revisions.

Above is art for the Troll monster. Again I tried to base it on common concept of what a troll is crossed with the fantasy D&D style troll, and ended with a mutated version of one of those troll dolls.
The hair still bothers me, but I need to move on. When it's seen in the game it'll only be 200 pixels so I have to keep myself from putting a lot of effort into each monster.
The face is a bit based off of the trolls from Ernest Scared Stupid, which traumatized me as a kid and is one of the few movies that gives me the willies, even to this day. That made it a bit difficult to work on this piece.
I struggled again with the skin color. Goblins, orcs, trolls and ogres all have green skin in my subconscious for some reason, so I have to force myself to come up with alternative palettes. The goblin was green, so the troll is more blue-green. Trolls in Warcraft are blue, but they're basically elves with tusks. Ogres from oblivion are blue so I'll really have to come up with something else if I paint an ogre. Maybe more flesh colored I suppose. Orcs in D&D are gray, so I'll probably do that if I paint an orc. Maybe brown-green.

Imp

Another monster for the game, Relentless Dungeon. I tried to go for angry cat ears but they ended up looking more like horns. Add that to the stance and it's more of a gargoyle than an imp. But there's so many variations of these fantasy monsters that you can't really define what is what. It's all fiction anyways, so I'm not going to stress too much about it.

I really like the end result of this one. This is my favorite of all the monsters because of its creepy pose and impish expression.

I don't have a sketch version this time as the process went pretty fast. Instead is an alternate version before input from others, along with a thumbnail.

The first version was too bulky. I was hesitant to remove the part of his back above his head, but it gives him a better silhouette. I usually start drawing things very muscle-y so I can get proper anatomy, and is also probably due to drawing superheros as a kid when I was learning to draw. 

Two thumbnails were drawn quickly so I could get a feel for both the bottom and upper portions of the monster without making it too cluttered with dark lines.

Skeleton art asset

 I painted a skeleton in Photoshop for an upcoming indie game called Relentless Dungeon from Scott Washington. http://scottwashi.com/

I'm not a fan of skeletons as monsters because it's too much of a stretch of the imagination for me. How can they move around without muscles and tendons and all those bits? I get so annoyed in horror movies when a skeleton lurches out of a coffin and coughs up dust. How can they cough without lungs or a throat? That's just silly. So when I went to paint a skeleton monster I wanted to draw a complicated transparent glowing magical muscle structure holding the skeleton together.

I realized working at such a small resolution would make it extremely difficult to convey that message to the player. In the end I bit the bullet of artistic mediocrity and did it the way every other skeleton has been done for the sake of readability.

 In a later revision I put the blue glow-y bits back in a much less noticeable way, but still enough to satisfy me and my skepticism of skeletons as enemies.