Illustration

Red Spider a superhero swinging from building to building

female superheroThis is another image from The Future heroes Role-Playing Game. It shows a dystopian future city, rust colored and dilapidated. Through the canyons of the future city swings Red Spider, a superhero with powers connected to projecting rays of web like matter from the palms of her hands.

I’m just noticing that a lot of the images I’ve been doing are of graceful superheroes. The very next one will have to be some huge brute with big muscles and bad skin, such as The Hulk, Ben Grim, or one of the other tanks that no superhero team seems to be complete without.

As with most superheroes from the Future Heroes setting, she does not wear a mask. Superpowers are much more accepted in the extreme future setting of the game, and the authorities are falling over themselves to recruit people with superpowers.

In such a universe the superhero sees little need to hide their identity.

Wikipedia gives some common motivations for a character to choose to have a secret identity, which include:
Allowing the character to live a “normal life” when not fighting crime.
Preventing the hero’s enemies from seeking revenge on others the hero may care about.
Giving the hero an advantage in crime fighting (e.g. Batman or The Shadow striking fear into criminals).
Gaining timely information on incidents as they happen, often through their occupation or that of their associates (e.g. a reporter or a newscaster would likely be more informed about incidents that a hero might be able to help with).
Aliens, upon coming to Earth, may choose to set up one or more secret identities as a learning tool. By pretending to be humans, they can explore the different roles and lives that a regular human is expected to have in his/her life and using their deeper understanding of human condition to help others.

None of these really seem to hold anymore in the setting of the far future, although if the superhero gets sent into the past, there would be some incentive to assume a secret identity.

More Superhero Role-Playing Game Art

superhero in power armor in orbitHere’s another image from the latest Starbright role-playing game, Future Heroes. The image is an illustration of a superhero, whose powers are based around his power armor.

The armor has the weird look of something quite alien that has been given a jazzy paint job to make it look fit for use by a superhero.The strange ‘grafted’ look of the armor with bulky arms and slim torso is intentional, to make it look like a piece of eldritch alien technology that has only partially succeeded in fitting to the form of its latest, human, wearer.

The colors are reminiscent of the Iron Man suit, which was unintentional, but once I realized, I decided not to change the color scheme. The character has nothing in common with that Marvel character, except that it is armor, and the colors, everything else is weird and different. I think they’re great colors for a suit of power armor – the gold especially – and I think it’s obvious that I wasn’t trying to rip Iron Man off, or any other Marvel superheroes for that matter.

My head was totally in the world of science-fiction based superheroes, like Green Lantern, and The League of Superheroes. The game is based in a far future setting, called the Extreme Future Universe, and isn’t intended to simulate the world of 20th century heroes like Iron Man, The Hulk, and the rest.

The suit of armor is also much more ‘skin-tight’ than any worn by a superhero operating in the present day. The technology of the extreme future has advanced to such a degree that even thin materials can be given the properties of a suit of kevlar armor – if the superhero has the money.

So check out Future Heroes the sci-fi superhero game, for more art, more technology, and more adventure.

Dark Superhero Flying Over Futuristic City

superhero flying over ctyI’ve created another piece of art for the upcoming Future Heroes Role-Playing game, which will be fully compatible with the Extreme Future game, which is already published.

In fact I’m in two minds about whether this character should be a superhero or a supervillain.  If I decide to use him as a villain, he’ll be used as a foil to the player-character superheroes.

This supervillain – I’ve yet to think up a name for the character – will possesse commensurate powers and abilities to the team of superheroes, so that he can present a daunting challenge to them. I haven’t decided if his powers will be mystical or superalien powers, but this supervillain, I’m leaning towards the name ‘Sunspot’, possesses a genius intellect that allows him to draft complex schemes and create fantastic devices. As a future hero, he will also have considerable resources at his disposal to further his aims.

His powers will most probably centre around controlling heat energy. He will be able to use this ability as a blast weapon, to fly on a trail of ‘heat’, have a heat shield, and one other power, perhaps the ability to melt any object or device, no matter how indestructible the material.

As soon as Future Heroes is complete, I’ll post it to my page at RPGDriveThru for download. It will be the usual PDF format, so take a look, and get ready to blast into heroic extreme future adventures here.

Future Heroes RPG

future heroes role-playing game coverI’ve been working on the latest Role Playing Game set in the Extreme Future universe. The text is 90% there, including game system and descriptions, so the next task is the illustration. The latest version of the cover is really coming together.

The text of the title is in a different font to the usual 3D titles, with a more comic-book look.

It’s based on all those comic books where superheroes have their amazing adventures against the backdrop of a super-advanced civilization.  Comic books like the Legion of Superheroes.

The Legion of Super-Heroes is a fictional superhero team in the 30th and 31st centuries of the DC Comics Universe. The team first appears in Adventure Comics #247 (April 1958), and was created by Otto Binder and Al Plastino, but I didn’t start reading about the Legion till the 80s.

Initially, the team was closely associated with the original Superboy (Superman when he was a teenager), and was first portrayed as a group of time travelers who frequently visited him. In later years, the Legion’s origin and back story were fleshed out, and the group replaced Superboy as the focus of their stories; eventually Superboy was removed altogether, except as an occasional guest star. When I started reading, there were none of the classic ‘famous’ superheroes like Superman, and Batman involved.

The team has undergone several major reboots during its publication. The original version was replaced with a new rebooted version following the events of Zero Hour and another rebooted team was introduced in 2004. A fourth version of the team, nearly identical to the original version, was introduced in 2007. As a result, Superman (both as an adult and a teenager) and the current version of Supergirl have been reincorporated into Legion history. I’ve started reading again, and Supergirl makes a surprisingly good addition to the team.

Peacock

a digital painting of a peacockAn image of a peacock I did with a nice puzzling tail. This image is a digital painting created using GIMP, and my trusty Wacom graphics tablet.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open source software image retouching and editing tool and is freely available in versions tailored for most popular operating systems including Linux. It has the tools in a separate window to the drawing, which most users find very annoying, but otherwise it’s tops.

The developers and maintainers of strive for it to be a free software graphics application for the editing and creation of original images, photos, icons, graphical elements of web pages and art for user interface elements. It has that groovy free vibe, that a monster like Photoshop will never be able to emulate.

 

Space Monster Chasing Spaceship

space monsterAnother image from the Deep Space Encounters supplement for the Extreme Future role-playing game. This deep space encounter is of the rather dangerous kind, because this alien is very much inspired by the gods of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu pantheon. It is an alien that uses its immense power just to torment and torture the unlucky inhabitants of any spaceship it happens to stumble on.

I’ve also added a map, called the Metraz Area Guide, for download that charts the area where the Realms‘ novel, The Pet Dragon, takes place. This booklet details Metraz and the surrounding area. This is one of the most important areas of Hyrope, which acts as a backdrop to the Realms role-playing game. The booklet details eleven realms in all, with some interesting snippets of information to bring each one alive.

The booklet comes with a map that includes all the political powers and their territories, including elven forests, human cities, and dwarven mountains. The maps can be printed out to use as a nice handout during sessions playing Realms – take a look at the rule book here.

Starliner Spaceship

starlinerI was looking through my hard disc for inspiration and came across an image I created a long time ago. It’s a scan of a sketch that I coloured after scanning.

One of the things I like about this illustration is the giant transparent bubbles on its flanks. Some parkland can be seen below the protection of the nearest bubble and even the suggestion of a swimming pool.

I’ll have to come up with the statistics so that it can be used in Extreme Future – the sci-fi role-playing game as soon as possible.

I’ll probably scale it up in GIMP and work into the illustration a little to make it look like the other spaceship illustrations used in the game. At the moment it has more of the style of the sort of spaceship you might see in a Japanese animation. That’s no bad thing of course, but it’s not the look I want for the Extreme Future role-playing game.

The Pet Dragon Fantasy Novel Arrives on Amazon

cover and product page for the fantasy novel The Pet Dragon on amazonThe Pet Dragon, the fantasy novel I’ve just written, has turned up on Amazon, and looks nice there on the old familiar Amazon product page. I’m very happy with the green cover, which gives a good feeling of the elves and forests of the novel’s setting.

It’s great to see it there and after exploring a little further, I found there’s a way to enable the ‘look inside’ feature. I simply fill in a few details and send a request email, and, according to the information on the Amazon site, the feature will soon be enabled. I’m a big fan of the ‘look inside’ feature and I’ve already sent the email, and of course I already have a PDF I can upload, so the feature should be available for The Pet Dragon very soon.

The book is an old-school fantasy novel containing the first installment of the story of a young elven maiden who goes from obscurity in the forest to playing a huge role in the destiny of the fantasy world in which she lives. The first stage of her story is her meeting with a freshly hatched dragon, and the friendship they form that will go on to have such a huge influence on the direction of her life, and the lives of those around her.

Jungle Space Pirate

female space pirate in the jungleI’m working on Illustrations for a new supplement for the Extreme Future sci-fi role-playing game, which I’m thinking of calling Deep Space Encounters. The picture is a space pirate in a jungle on some lonely alien planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy.

I’m thinking that there’s no reason pirates shouldn’t bury their treasure in the extreme future, just as they did in the past. I’m writing that up as an encounter for the game as we speak. Perhaps the players will find a pirate spaceship orbiting an out of the way planet, with the spaceship strangely deserted. The encounter would then revolve around the pirates on the surface of the planet fighting it out over treasure buried in a terrible alien swamp.

The illustration will go with encounter description. The pirate in the illustration might even be the leader of the band of interstellar cutthroats.

The whole book will basically be a bunch of wandering monster tables, but for deep space and with fleshed-out encounters rather than just a bunch of monsters for the players to deal with. Putting the book together is proving a lot of fun and, with a bit of luck, it’ll be finished soon. I’ll upload it to the RPG Drivethru site as soon as it’s ready, so it can be downloaded straight away., along with all the other Extreme Future stuff.

Spiralling Cat Illustration in blue

blue cat imageThis blue cat is a nice looking image and I’ve uploaded it – as I have a load of other stuff – to Society6, for sale.

The blue cat in this illustration is intended to look complex and sophisticated, and although it is speaking in the image, the only words that are coming are spirals.

The cat is a relaxed and urbane creature that obviously lives in the city, and a cosmopolitan city at that.

It even looks a little mysterious and evil. I designed it together with my girlfriend.