I love doing illustrations, taking a scene described in prose and creating a visual for it. If my client has a scene in mind I’m usually happy to go with what they ask me to portray. I will admit that I have even more fun when I get a manuscript and I’m told to come up with the illustrations myself.

If I’m illustrating a comic choosing what to draw is fairly easy. Comics are stories told with words and pictures but primarily pictures. You can have a wordless comic but not a comic without pictures. So I’d draw the quiet moments, the big climaxes and everything in between.

Illustrating a prose story is trickier. Most prose stories are intended to exist without illustrations. Even most childrens’ picture books have stories that would make sense if just read aloud. Those stories usually aren’t as much fun without the illustrations but they’ll work. When a story is intended to be read I try to be careful what I chose to illustrate. Some scenes work better in the readers’ imagination. It’s downright rude to show the hero defeating the monster or unmasking the villain. I expect that the reader is going to look at the pictures first and then read the prose. Human attention is drawn to images. I don’t want to spoil an author’s hard work by giving away the surprises so, when illustrating prose, I’m usually drawing the beginnings of scenes and actions and rarely the climaxes.

Providing illustrations for an RPG is different challenge. RPGs are kind of like those choose-your-own adventure books but the way the adventures unfold in a RPG can vary even more than with a choose-own-adventure. They’re interactive stories where the characters (the players) can take the plot in directions the original author never would have expected. The game master presents a scenario to the players, the players invent characters (or bring previous established ones) to experience the scenario and the story is created during the play. When illustrating an RPG I can depict the non-player characters that the players might meet and I can depict the inciting incidents that get the game/story started and after that the game/story can head off into unknown territory. As such I’m often creating “flavor” illustrations – pictures of the environments that the characters will pass through. For Detour and the Dark Conspiracy game in general that pretty easy. The above illustration is of one of the sights the characters could have seen on their journey. It’s not actually anything that’s described in the game manuscript. I could have invented a dozen other images to illustrate this section and all of them would have been appropriate. I love that kind of freedom.

A sketch of the “zombies” in the Detour scenario for the revived Dark Conspiracy RPG. Technically they aren’t zombies but you’ll have to get the book to find out what they actually are.

I’m not going to say anything of what this is a sketch. Other than it appears in Detour and your player characters are going to be really sorry if they have to tangle with it. Maybe they’ll get lucky and all get killed before they meet it. Not that getting killed will prevent it from making use of them.

Here’s a second sketch for an NPC portrait for Detour. This is the sketch I submitted to the folks at 3Hombres Games for approval before inking/graphiting/photoshopping. As with yesterday’s NPC portrait I added background to the image later.

I enjoy the challenge of doing NPC portraits. I try to make each portrait unique. Whenever possible I include a background behind the character that hopefully helps the gamemaster get a better sense who that character is and how to play him or her.

The rough sketch of Doug Wiley for Detour doesn’t really demonstrate that so I’m including the final illustration below as an example. In general I prefer to let the final illustrations be only in available in the actual product until the product has had a chance to sell for a while.

I mentioned yesterday that I usually color my illustrations in Photoshop because it takes me a while to get a good color combination worked out. The final cover art of Detour is a good example of that. It took me forever to get a good balance. I’d originally started with red and blue as my primary pallet but the “zombies”, being pretty blue themselves, didn’t stand out as well against the other blues. Once I substituted green I got a better contrast.

And I still needed to make adjustments at the very end. The final art looked pretty good on my computer but I’ll learned from sad experience that a dark, brooding image on a monitor just looks dark in print. Sometimes that’s what a publisher wants but I felt like I’d be doing the folks at 3Hombres Games a disservice if I didn’t give them a choice to work with. The second version below has the contrasts adjusted so it’s lighter. I figured that version was more likely to stand out on a display rack. Feel free to check out their announcement to see which version they chose.

This is the scan of the final “real world” version of the Detour cover art. The color for most of my illustrations is added in Photoshop. That way I have more flexibility if I need to make corrections. For me, working with color is a tricky business. I’m still learning what colors work well together, which clash and the difference between too many colors and not enough. With Photoshop I can experiment with different colors and compositions until I find the best looking one.

The original art is usually done in ink and graphite. I lay down the areas I want to be solid black with a brush and india ink and then add tones with a B weight pencil. Lately I’ve been using gray tone markers as well. The markers add variety to the textures in the illustration.

I’m interrupting the Oz Squad posts to throw some attention at another project I worked on recently – the resurrection of the Dark Conspiracy RPG. 3Hombres Games are the folks producing both new and revised material. Their first release – Detour – went live on Friday at drivethrustuff.com.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting the rough sketches of the illustrations I did for this supplement. The final art is available in the product.

Today’s post is of the really rough sketch for the cover. I usually do three or four thumbnail sketches for a possible cover and submit them to my editors to choose from. In this case I did a number of really bad, barely comprehensible sketches that made no sense to anyone but me, finally came up with this one and, fortunately, the editors liked it.