Illustration

monster illustration for sci-fi role-playing game extreme future

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/18 18:15 Posted in Extreme Future, Illustration, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (1)

monster illustration for sci-fi rpgI’ve been working on the art for Extreme Future and its supplements. I was looking through the sketches I have on my hard disk, and I found a nice sketch of a sci-fi monster walking down a spaceship corridor. It’s in the tradition of Alien, and those sort of biological construct kind of monster aliens, but this alien – I call it the ‘Scorpiant’ – has cybernetics too.

The idea is that the creature can secrete metal as it grows, and so has a metal skeleton, metal claws, and a metal syringe sticking out the end of its tail that it can use to sting player characters – and NPCs too pf course – rather like a scorpion.

When there are a group of them , they organise themselves like an ant hill, with warriors, a queen, drones etc. But mostly warriors, this being an action and adventure game set in deep space.

I’m writing a new supplement for Extreme Future, which will include table to be rolled on when characters are traveling through deep space. They will be sort of like the wandering monster tables from old D&D, but there will be loads of encounters based around monsters, wrecked spaceships, distress calls coming from strange planets, space pirates and the like.

I think this illustration will make a fine cover, with a bit more work, but it is definitely heading in the right direction. It just needs to be perhaps a bit darker, with even more shadows in the spaceship corridor.

 

A female jedi knight

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/11 05:51 Posted in Heros in Time, Illustration, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (0)

female sci-fi warriorI’ve been working with my graphics tablet and GIMP for the last couple of hours, just so I would have something to post for Illustration Friday. Well that’s not quite true, I’m killing two birds, as it were, because if the illustration is good enough, it will end up being the cover for a role-playing game called Heroes in Time.

The female warrior, seen in the painting with her back to the fire on the bridge of a doomed spaceship, is actually just a detail of the finished painting. The picture will also have a barbarian in a cave, representing the other end of time.

In the game, the player characters can choose to play as different types of adventurer from the very beginnings of time, to the very end. So they can be a robot, a magic user, an investigator from modern times, or the most primal of cave people.

It was when I was cropping out a nice thumb to paste on Illustration Friday that I noticed that the female jedi could easily be the subject of her own painting.

I like the urgent and energetic the image has right now, but I’m aware it will need some smoothing out, some detail, and a few more hours of attention before it really reaches a place where it could be called a finished piece of digital painting.

I keep coming back to this image though – attracted by the juxtaposition between brutal cave thug and sophisticate spacewoman – so undoubtedly it will eventually get to that coveted polished state of a completed painting.

The barbarian standing beside our woman from the future looks a bit naked I just noticed. I think the next stage will be to paint him in some clothes :-).

fantasy and sci-fi warriors

 

New Fantasy eBook hits the virtual shelving

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/10 22:20 Posted in Illustration  |  Comments (0)

ebook download shop screenshoz My fantasy novel is finally finished, and has hit the shelves. Well the virtual shelves at the likes of Smashwords, anyway.

The main character in the book is called Willowtide. As the blurb I wrote for the website tells, she is a young elven girl living in a fantasy world where dragons fly the skies and danger stalks the land. Either impulse or destiny sends her on a journey to save and befriend a dragon, a journey that has huge and unforeseen consequences for her, her friends, and the entire known world.
She is banished from the elven forest, attacked by monsters, befriended by the great and the good, and has to tap her latent magic powers just to survive.

Smashwords do the eBook version of books exclusively, and so the formatting is a little different. The book has to be turned into something a little like a big long river of text, with no page n umbers as different devices people use to view the book will cram a different number of words onto the page.

Getting all the little details right, such as fonts, formats and formatting has taken pretty much my whole day, but it’s worth it to see my work out there.

Next I’ll probably be turning to science fiction, and some nice space opera with spaceships, robots and monsters, unless of course ‘The Pet Dragon’ sells well, and then it’ll be back to the magical worlds of fantasy for more stories of elves, dragons, and even a few humans too.

 

Space Weasle

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/07 00:37 Posted in Illustration  |  Comments (1)

space weasle with blue furAnd, I’ve just uploaded another phone skin to society6. I had an image I doodled of a space weasel, which I had originally created very, very small indeed. I made it a few years ago in Photoshop, and there was just no way of improving the quality.

So I imported it into Inkscape, and copied the shapes as vectors. I probably wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t wanted to upload it to the art site for possible sale. After creating it as an .svg file in Inkscape I can now resize the file to any size I want.

It’s perhaps a little bare with a white background, so I might add some detail to the image behind the subject. Perhaps a spaceship bridge, or the surface of a strange alien planet.

The planet might benefit from having dinosaurs of course, because there really isn’t any image that wouldn’t benefit from a few dinosaurs in the background, or perhaps this illustration will just languish on my hard drive, like so many others. I’m feeling guilty about not working on my novel after all, and it might be time to try and finally get it finished.

Or I might let it stay just the way it is, an illustration of a cute character, against a simple white background. I’m thinking it might look really nice on a phone skin.

The vector art process is a very useful addition, even to an artist like me who thinks of himself as a painter rather than a graphic designer. It unifies and simplifies an image, and gives it really nice clean look. And with Inkscape, there is much less chance of nasty ol’ pixelation.

Sick Little Bunny phone skin design

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/06 01:57 Posted in Fantasy, Illustration, Self Publishing, The Pet Dragon  |  Comments (2)

cute character design for phone skinI’ve been adding a few images to the society6 art site over the past few days. I found a few nice images I did a while ago, on an external hard drive I’ve been using for backups. This bunny phone skin design for example is a couple of years old, though I only completed it last year.

One of the fun parts of the whole process – apart from the idea that somebody may one day actually buy an image – is seeing my art on a phone skin or laptop case. It makes it look kind of like it has already been used in making the product, even though of course I’m aware the merchandise is only produced on demand.

I particularly like ‘Sick Little Bunny’ because, despite his messed up teeth, his bilious colour, his big fat belly, and his squint, he’s still kind of cute. I have quite a large selection of these creatures and characters I’ve designed over the years, including space weasels, elephants, robots and aliens, and I’ll probably take a little time each night to upload one or two to society6, and get a kick out of seeing them on a mobile phone skin.

This isn’t detracting from my novel too much either. I managed to write 2,500 words tonight, though the writing kept me up later into the night than I probably intended. I’m getting quite excited about the book, as it gets closer and closer to being completed. I’ll have to think seriously about getting the cover illustration finished, because I’m hoping I may well need it soon.

A Cute Alien in a Crater Illustration

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/03 16:27 Posted in Illustration  |  Comments (0)

a cute pink alienI just did a quick digital painting using GIMP and Inkscape of a cute alien poking its head out of a crater. I’ve painted it in a format that I can sell as a mobile phone cover – although everyone in the world seems to have a smartphone and cover already. I used Inkscape to make the basic shapes with clean lines. Then I exported it to GIMP and added a few nice shadows and other touches to make it more 3D and alive.

It’s nice to be doing an illustration just for the sake of it again, after doing a lot of illustration specially for the Extreme Future sci-fi role-playing game. It’s still a sci-fi illustration of course, as everything science fiction is still my first love, but it has a touch of cute about it that most of my sci-fi illustration doesn’t. My illustration, especuially for the sci-fi role-playing games, tends to be a lot more gritty and ‘realistc’ – if it’s possible to use that term about faster than light travel in the extreme future.

I have a bunch more of these cute alien designs that I have created over the years and I’m planning to do a few more paintings like this one in sizes that can be used for cool things like mobile phone covers and laptop covers, but the main reason for doing them is that they are just a lot of fun.

I’ve also found a site that I can sell the image through, and who will deliver the iphone case with my illustration.

Updated Front Page with Second Edition of the SciFi RPG

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/03 00:57 Posted in Extreme Future, Illustration, Role-Playing Games, Self Publishing  |  Comments (0)

sci-fi RPG website screenshot Extreme Future, the sci-fi role-playing game, has been in its second edition for quite some time now, a few weeks at least, and I’ve finally gotten round to updating the front page of the sci-fi and fantasy publishing and illustration website to reflect that. I’m very proud of the new edition, and on top of a vastly expanded background galaxy – yes an entire galaxy – to adventure in, the game system is also now entirely designed in house.

Designing a dedicated game system, rather than using an off the peg system like FUDGE, was the only way to get the control I required. I wanted to make a game that was light on the bookkeeping, but heavy on cool detail and stats for all the sci-fi hardware of the setting, including robots, spaceships, weapons and monsters – oops, I mean belligerent aliens.

I quite like the cover as well, it sums up the busy environment of the game, with lots of action both in space and on planetary surfaces. It also emphasises the space opera aspect of the games, where some attempt has been made to keep things corresponding to real science concepts, but never at the expense of making things cool. Faster than light travel and communication are commonplace in the background to this role-playing game and psionics are also far from uncommon. One of the weapons available is even an approximation of the good old force sword famous from a certain blockbuster sci-fi movie that shall remain nameless.

And on top of all this there are also extensive rules for including mechs within the gaming experience. They fit into a space opera setting surprisingly seamlessly.  RPG Drivethru has a few pages of the game that can be flicked through, and of course this sci-fi role-playing game is available for sale there too, take a look.

A pretty good app for translating Italian words

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/02 02:11 Posted in Illustration  |  Comments (0)

english italian dictionary icon imageThis is just a little test post to see if the plugin in my blog to crosspost to Facebook is working. But just so that it isn’t too boring, I’ll tell you about my efforts to learn Italian. I’m learning it by reading a comic book, and translating as I go with a dictionary. I thought the best way to have a dicionary with me at all time was to get one as a free app for my iPod, and I was half right.

There was a pretty good app available, but not any of the free ones. None of the free dictionary apps I tried recognised any of the words, but this one at a few dollars recognises most works.

One of my spaceship illustrations turns up, with a credit

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/01 14:46 Posted in Illustration  |  Comments (3)

Here is a green spaceship I painted, being used on a self-publishing writer’s blog. It’s always great to see my stuff being used out there, of course there are copyright issues, because the image is being used without my consent – but with a link so I think it’s cool. And it made me aware of a fellow creative’s blog, when the image got linked back.

I’m very ambivalent about the whole copyright issue anyway, and I think it has evolved to become a nasty way for big companies and governments to control what we see and when; a bad thing, of course.

There is for example the famous civil rights documentary ‘Eyes on the Prize’ that can’t be shown because nobody can afford to pay the copyright fees for the song ‘Happy Birthday’ that is sung to Martin Luther King by his supporters in one scene.

So I’m very deeply against copyright being used to stifle creative people.

In fact it would be great to live in a world where income was distributed equally to all irrespective of the work they did (so people did useful work that they actually wanted to, and that made them happy – rather than being forced to join the army of people forced to work producing either nothing, or worse helping to destroy the planet we inhabit). I’m a bit of a lefty :-). In such a world, we’d all get paid and we wouldn’t have to spend collective centuries arguing in court over who owns the rights to some slogan or jingle or other so the winner of the case could move into a mansion and the loser went outside to die on the street.

I also hate to see young inexperienced people having what they created being taken away from them by companies, or things like DNA being copyrighted, or Basmati Rice. It’s all nuts, so I have no particular issue with this struggling author using my image, at a resolution too low to be used in print, and with a link back to the source.

That seems to be cool behaviour from someone who respects me as a creative person. Of course (in case this post ever turns up in a court case in the future when I’m a big famous artist/writer/whatever) I do reserve the right to sue anybody that rips off my images, especially if they can afford to pay :-)

RPG spaceships with Blender

By The Illustrator  |  2012/02/16 01:45 Posted in 3D, Blender, Extreme Future, Illustration, Role-Playing Games, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

early role-playing game spaceship mesh

I’m working on a new supplement for Extreme Future, the sci-fi role-playing game, it was released a few days ago and is already selling well. The new supplement will probably be based around a spaceship.

The spaceship will be something like a freighter or scientific exploration spaceship. It’ll be a small one; the perfect size for a group of adventurers to use it as a base and means of transport combined.

I’m planning to include all the usual goodies, including deck plans, a technical readout and lots of other detail, but I’ll also include some ideas about how it can be integrated into an ongoing sci-fi role-playing campaign game.

The first stage for me is to come up with a beautiful 3D render of the hull of the spaceship, and perhaps some concept art and some modeling of interior detail. As usual I’ll be posting lots of renders of it as a work in progress, before finally releasing the supplement, so many that regular readers of the blog will probably soon be sick of the sight of the spaceship.

.second edition sci-fi RPG cover

It’s great to have the nuts and bolts of a huge and versatile science fiction, space opera setting where I can easily insert the hig-tech equipment I come up with. One of the beauties of sci-fi role playing is all the robots, spaceships, blasters and other assorted hardware that the players can choose for their adventurers, so take a look at the core rules for Extreme Future, the sci-fi role-playing game, which already has everything necessary for spaceship design, and slot the new spaceship in as soon as it’s done.