Friday, January 15, 2010

Fantasy Illustration - Tiamat's Chosen - Final

This is a mock fantasy book cover, set in the Forgotten Realms universe, that I did on commission.

The client wanted something that was akin to a Star Wars movie poster with characters sprinkled throughout the image. The blue character, Ningal, is some sort of important leader in the country of Unther. The other famous character in the image is Tiamat -- she's in the upper right corner. She's a dragon deity in cloaked in human form. The client wanted her depicted as a sort of spunky teenager girl.

During the process of creating this picture I worked out a design for each character before combining them into the picture. Here's the related character design blog posts.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Fantasy Illustration - Tiamat's Chosen: Designing the rest

The remaining three characters in the Forgotten Realms illustration were original player characters which needed to be designed from scratch. Working from text descriptions and story details, the characters took form.

Zeldara was described as a druid with wild brown hair and natural earth toned clothing. I wanted to give her an untamed, living-close-to-nature look, so I added some scattered flowers throughout her tangled hair. Here you can see the build up from basic body, to clothed figure.


Xaxier is the key figure in the story. He's a tall and strong monk/assassin with questionable morals that fights with his hands. His key features are the three concentric blue circles on his forehead and golden eyes and skin.


Firaelia is a half-elf mage. She carries a rapier and casts Shadow magic. She is the shortest and most curvaceous of the bunch.


Finally, here's the height chart showing how they all line up with each other. Xavior and Ningal are among the tallest.


Coming up next, the finished illustration!

If you missed it, here's the previous character design installment: http://quasieducational.blogspot.com/2009/12/fantasy-illustration-tiamats-chosen_31.html