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Inkthinker — Spellbound Cover
Published: 2011-06-13 21:34:53 +0000 UTC; Views: 11683; Favourites: 189; Downloads: 428
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Description
The cover to Crafty Games upcoming Fantasy Craft supplement SpellBound, due out later this year. Check out the supersize edition by clicking the DL button up there.Full color painting and I have been cautious friends at best. I'm much more comfortable with contours and linework, and even when I work with tone and shape it tends to influence my thinking. If I'm comfortable with any color technique, it's a cel style (unsurprisingly), but I keep throwing myself into the full-paints grinder whenever I can get a proper chance. I'm very much open to suggestions for ways I could improve my techniques.
I think with this cover, I substituted amusing details for solid painting skills. I liked the effect I put together for reaching into a Bag of Holding. Ideally there should be something funny or neat or at least visually interesting going on nearly everywhere you look, but if I composed it well then it doesn't overwhelm the action of the larger illustration. Ooo, listen to me sound fancy.
In addition, it's the return of the Hunt the Logo game! Buried in the details are variant versions of my lightbulb logo, try and find 'em all. I'm going to have to start painting a reminder of the total number I put into a piece like this, 'cause when almost a year goes by I tend to forget. At least 6 that I know of (repeat patterns count as 1), plus a couple signatures beyond the most obvious.
It makes a nice wallpaper too, if I don't mind saying so.
Illustrated entirely in Photoshop on a Cintiq 21UX, if you'd like to see the progression of stages (and witness all the horrible mistakes I made right from the beginning) check out the gallery at Crafty's Facebook page , and see if you Like it.
©2010 Crafty Games and Ben McSweeney.
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Comments: 36
Not used to seeing you work in colour, but I've been gone from dA a long, long time.
O.K. *knuckle crack* Composition looks fairly solid to me; the dragonfire gives a good visual loop around the picture plane, assisted by the claws lower left and upper right, and the electrical discharges at upper right (the upper left electrical sparks shove my eye off of the picture plane.) In the centre portion, the only element that bugs me, in terms of composition, is the sword; although the axis of the blade thoroughly avoids the lower right corner, it still shunts my gaze off the page. Perhaps a greater contrast between inside and outside of her barrier?
Having myself all of the coloursense of a noon-blind owlet, I cannot say much in the colouring department (though I prefer the red claws in the initial WIPs, since they draw more attention to the draconic threat in the background, and I really like that version where the interior of her shielding is still just barely blue with a bit of red over the... fiery thing... **** cannot think of the word... is it brazier?).
Now, the main thing that bothers me is her left arm. Yes, I can clearly see where it is *supposed* to be, but between the gold bracelets, red pockets, and excessive darkness in the palm, it, to me, ends up as a rather amorphous lump. (The drop of blood from her slit pinky is absolutely perfect, I must say.) Those pockets on her forearms create a tricky problem; apart from the books, they are the only really oblong objects present. Most of the books, energy-struck and moving as they are, contribute to the movement of the eye, and have movement in their own lines, but those pockets... sorry to harp on them, but they just keep drawing my eye as these leaden, lifeless objects....
Also, are the dragon's claws meant to be translucent? The shading confuses me. The black burning thing at the centre right confuses me as well and keeps pulling my eye to it, disrupting the flow... yet something seems to need to be there... argh, sorry to be so useless...
Things I love? That shield boundary is the sh*t, Ink. Also, the sackboy/homunculus combusting at the lower left. The charring wood of her worktable is also excellent.
Things I seriously question? That aqua in the background. Despite the marked contrast to the yellow-white of the barrier, the aqua-blue still tries to jump into the foreground. I know the guidelines, cold goes back, warm comes forward, but I guess that aqua-blue is just warm enough to compete with the foreground colours. Personally, I would cool the b/g down a bit, see if it could be pushed back enough to move the dragon's head to the middle-ground (even with the leaf/forest green of the dragon's head, the aqua in the background tends to pull the dragon back, especially with the strong contrast against the flames).
Oh, and did I say I love those dragonflames around her barrier? Because I do.
Hmm... nothing else useful to say -- assuming any of this is useful!! e.deviantart.net/emoticons/b/b… " width="15" height="15" alt="
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Dude, so good to see you back on!
I think it's a fair crit. Her costume design was set by the cover art to the original gamebook (which I also painted, so it's still my fault that she's got baggy sleeves and boxy forearm pouches, but I like 'em, they're suitably "wizardly" costume elements), but I probably could have draped the cloth more effectively to hint at the shape of her arms.
When I set the color scheme on this I was trying a technique by where I did a tonal value version first, in grey, and then I began tinting it with the color scheme I wanted. This turned out to have some weird effects when it came to tying the colors together, and I spent a good bit of time adjusting the temperature of various values around the canvas. I had initially thought that keeping everything inside the shield "cool" would work well, but in the end it just looked very artificial and not particularly attractive, I was much happier with the overall scheme when I allowed the colors inside the bubble to warm up. The aqua tone is a remnant of that cool color scheme, which I kept partly because it is a total countertone to the warm fire (emphasizing the barrier), and because it matches the tone of the bubble she's blowing and I wanted to draw a subtle connection between the two (probably too subtle).
The dragons claws are totally meant to have a slightly smoky translucence. I opted away from the red because it looked too painted and distracted from the central character. I ended up with the blue-gray to match the blue-green of the dragon itself. The black shape to the right is a bit of burning cloth or paper, but mostly it's an attempt to add a tonal solid that matches the values at the opposite side and creates a bit of purposeful tangent with the table to lead the eyes back in to the center. In the composition as a whole I kept adding lines that lead toward the center (the crackling of the wood, the shelves, the knife, etc), but I couldn't say whether it was an effective technique in the way I intended it to be.
Do you think the knife would have worked better if it had been flipped around so that it pointed towards her rather than away? I tried a couple version of the blade melting outside the bubble, but none of them looked very good... in the end, I like it just smoking.
The flames came out better than I had any reasonable right to expect. I do wish I'd been able to convey a sense of scale and depth with the stream of fire, I think I dropped the ball there.
Thanks for the crit, man! It's food for thought. Post some new work!
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Glad you thought it was a fair crit; I often worry about picking at things too much when I usually feel like I don't have many constructive observations.
Okay, now I see that it's a piece of burning paper... I think the writing on the page gives it a bit of dimensionality which makes my eye, at least, interpret it as a more solid object and then get overly drawn to it trying to figure out what it is. I understand its functionality on the PP. Maybe if it were more of a middle value, not so dark?
I do think the knife would work better flipped around, if only because the eye often follows pointy things to where they, well, point.
Overall, I think the directing of the eye around the page works well; the bookshelves are particularly effective (and also prevent the eye from being led off the page by the dragon's claws on the right.)
New work soon! Still shaking the rust off of my drawing hand after a long spell in the day-job world.
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Amazing! The colors all work nicely, and the attention to detail is great. True talent
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Thanks! I'm still a novice when painting, but I keep at it!
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What the freaking hell. This is too amazing man. Get into groups! This deserves to be seen!
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I'm bothered by the lack of foreground elements in the composition. But if people want to add it to groups I don't see why not... I don't think I've turned down many requests.
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Haha, i should've known your standards are god like to be critical of this picture. How long have you been drawing? (I'm not asking this as a gauge on 'how to get better' since you clearly have the inherent talent for it. Just interested.)
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Most of my life (I'm 35). I've been getting paid to do it for about 15 years, though about half that time consisted of garbage work, a dependance on lucky breaks, and a ramen-noodle-level of pay. Hell, I was still taking on second jobs (non-drawing) as recently as ten years ago just to make ends meet, but I hopefully won't ever have to do that again.
When I started taking the basics of composition and layout (among other things) more seriously, the quality of my work (and my clients, and hence my returns) improved dramatically.
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I'll keep that in mind. Thank you for sharing
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I mean no offence what so ever in this comment but, is she smoking a meth pipe?
Not that I would know what that is...
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haha... no. It's something I didn't know if anyone would pick up on. She's blowing a bubble (like a soap bubble), and holding it. I wanted to imply that the bubble in the pipe is what forms the bubble of energy that's holding back the flames, but I think I was too subtle about it. The bubble has a little glowy to it, but it's not very noticeable. I thought about having wisps or crackles of energy that lead from it to the shield bubble, but that seemed overdone.
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Ah! I can see it now. Still! A brilliant piece of work! Good job.
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Personally I like the logo on the falling book best!
Great work as usual
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Thanks! That spiral variant on the bulb is one I've been using a lot.
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Very neat piece. I love all the fun little details you've put into it, and I love how they all come together to work with the theme. This is just the sort of painting I love.
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Nice work, no criticisms come to mind. You're starting to sound like Shirow alova sudden!
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Shirow? Masamune Shirow?
Thanks, but I don't think I'm anywhere near his level.
I did love all his notes in the Intron Depot series (it's one reason I despised v4, 'cause it had a shit-ton of copypasta and very little commentary) and in GitS and Applseed, though. And I found 'em enlightening, too. So I guess it's a good bar to aim for.
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I mention Shirow in the way you seemed to be your own biggest critic (I'm guilty of that, too)
Then again, a little humility, even when one possesses great talent, is a good thing. Keep on aiming higher!
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Soooo nice! I love the banana, and the familiar-on-fire!!! XD
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Turns out the secret to a good banana is the brown spotty bits. Who knew?
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The contrast between the frantic little doll-thingies and the mage herself going "Ho-hum, another home invasion by a dragon, how predictable" is hilarious.
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I've been following your artwork for a long time....and this is my favorite piece.
You may have sounded all fancy, but it was true...all the little details (funny though many of them are) contribute to the work as a whole.
I love it.
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Nice to see you stepping outside your comfort zone. I really like all the stuff that is half way through the shield or passing though it. And as always great job on all the little details, I counted six logos and one signature.
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You missed a sig then. There's at least two I know of.
I'm not even counting how many times I wrote "INK" somewhere in there.
Yeah, cover paints is definitely outside the comfort zone, but I like it.
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Sure, or golems, voodoo dolls, sackboys, whathaveyou. They gather up her components, hold up her books, and yell in her ear about the searing dragonfire just inches away.
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Haha yeah, she seems oddly unconcerned by the dragon raging behind her. Is that one homunculus getting sucked into the bag of holding, though? It kind of seems that way to me.
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I wanted to indicate some sort of dimensional warp at the mouth of the bag... I suppose someone as small as that would want to be extra careful they don't fall in, though.
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There is a slight tear in the dimensional fabric behind you there, ma'am.
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