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.

Fantasy Illustration - Tiamat's Chosen: Designing Ningal

Continuing the character design feature from last time, next up on the design plate is Ningal. Like Tiamat, Ningal is a pre-existing character in the D&D Forgotten Realms universe. This design was very straightforward. In the sketch, you can see how she compares to Tiamat's design - taller, with a more athletic build. I always tried to be very conscious of making every character unique from head to toe - not just clothing and facial features, but also their body type and build.

Fantasy Illustration - Tiamat's Chosen: Designing Tiamat

A recent book cover commission I worked on called for five detailed fantasy-themed character designs. In a series of blog posts over the next week or two, I'll talk about some interesting points about each of character designs.

First up is Tiamat, a canonical character of the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms universe. The client called for some substantial changes to her appearance, however, so she's very different in these design sketches.

My initial pass on her was a modern take on the classic design in Jeff Easley's Tiamat painting.

The client liked a lot of the design elements of the initial design, but had a younger, playful and flirtier Tiamat in mind, so it was back to the drawing board for a second pass.

In the second design she's shorter and less curvy, more impish rather than sinister.

I also came up with some variations on her outfit. #1 is the classic fantasy bikini, but this interpretation of Tiamat called for a more modest costume, so I tried a number of other designs. All of them feature dragon claw shoes, a nod to Tiamat's other form, a five-headed dragon. The client chose design #4, which you'll see in the finished illustration.

Ode to American Gothic

Another crazy anime related idea I couldn't suppress. This was probably sparked from an article Lindsay showed me about Taichi Takashita, and his online campaign to establish a law permitting marriage to fictional characters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/3283463/Japanese-launch-campaign-to-marry-comic-book-characters.html

Regardless of my feelings on this very important matter, it got me thinking about a picture combining a 2d cel-style character with a realistically painted character.

"It might create an interesting juxtaposition." I thought.

Initial image concept: “The image is composed like American Gothic, except with two people outside of a modern Japanese house or apartment community. The male character is a realistic looking guy, drawn in a photorealistic style. I'm not sure if I want him to look flattering, ugly, or average. I suppose he should be the type of guy who would marry an anime character. The female character is drawn in a generic anime style, and painted like an animation cel. She has a baby in her arms, drawn in a semi-manga style and colored with soft shading. The background art looks like a colorized manga panel, that is to say, it looks like a rotoscoped photo with screen tone. Add a color wash overtop to finish, but don't paint the bg.”

To get the background shot, I ended up having to do extensive photo research. I walked the streets of Tokyo on Google Earth for several hours collecting reference shots of buildings. Since I didn't own any of these photos and none of them where from the proper angle, I ended up drawing the background from scratch. It took the better part of a night, but it integrated into the picture far better than a manga-style photo trace would have.

I tried to echo contextual and textural elements from American Gothic throughout the image, like the patterning on the schoolgirl uniform. See if you can find everything. :)

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Characters sketched on 11”x14” Strathmore Series 400 Drawing paper. Background sketched on a 9x12 Strathmore Series 400 Sketch paper. Image finalized and painted in Photoshop CS 2. 2d character line art inked in Paint Tool SAI. About a week from concept to completion.