Over the years RPG manuals have developed a set of layout conventions – most of them have a banner (art running across the top of a page) or a border (art usually running down the outside side of each page) for the pages of the book. I can’t tell you when or why these conventions developed but one or the other (sometimes both) have been in most of the material I’ve looked at. The folks at 3Hombres have asked me to illustrate banners for the projects I’ve worked on. The sketch above is for the banner for Detour. This scenario involves a road trip and … let’s call them zombies … so hopefully this banner properly represents that flavor.
Detour Sketch – “Judge” Crater
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.
Detour Sketch – Doug Wiley
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.
Detour Cover – the Dark and the Light
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. 
Useless idea #245671 – Helen Vaughn, Wilbur Whately and the Frankenstein Monster form a detective agency and solve supernatural crimes. Or maybe they plot to destroy humanity.
Detour Cover – the Black and White Final
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.
Detour Cover – Final Sketch
From yesterday’s rough cover sketch I did this detailed pencil drawing. I’ve included the Detour title in each sketch (pasted in after scanning into Photoshop) so that I’m making sure to leave room for text in the final artwork.
If Detour were a movie pitch I’d say it was “The Road Warrior meets Dawn of the Dead (2004)” but, of course, it’s a little more complicated than that.
Detour Cover – Rough Sketch
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.
Coloring Oz – Dorothy 5
And here’s the finished piece. For most of these illustrations I’ll be putting “origin” references in the background. For Scarecrow it was the cornfield. For Dorothy it’s the tornado. I was tempted to do montage of the various routes that had taken Dorothy to Oz (washed overboard, earthquake, magic roads) but that would have made the drawing needlessly complicated.
Coloring Oz – Dorothy 4
As I’ve said, I’m dragging out the process of posting these process pieces. At this moment the only pieces actually finished are this one of Dorothy and the earlier one of Scarecrow. While I’m getting these finished I’m also working on a series of full page illustrations for this project and finishing up some other commissions.
Today’s image is the colorized tone layer that sits under the color and gray tone layer. (Sort of anyway. Layers in Photoshop can be “under” or “over” each other so they mask out other layers. They can also be “multiplied” so that the layers combine with each other.) I’ve duplicated the gray tone layer and used the flat colors to colorize it.
