Looking for a Party: Nilos, The Greek River Dragon

It's official, I've won my first creature of the week round! My little cancer-eating bacteria you see in the post-below scored up 19 out of 40 votes. I kinda wish I'd done even better, but I'm just happy to, finally, after so many attempts, get that win. So now, let's move back on to other business, where I'm less likely to win...

This week we had a COW winner (7 wins), by the username emerging, guest host Creature of the Week. The topic he chose was "Titan War Beast". This is our third official: "War Beast" round (Amphibious War Beast and Arctic War Beast being the other two), and I think this is the best I've done on any of them. The theme was to design a war beast that the Titans would have used in the battle against the Gods in Greek mythology. The idea was to use the sort of God of War-style epic imagery of colossal forces as our inspiration.

I decided to go with Tethys, wife of Oceanus and mother of the great Rivers of Greece, as the Titan I would draw from. I imagined that she had transformed the great rivers into massive dragon-like beasts. I invented a dumb little story that went along with it, as I did with my hanging gardens of Babylon creature, so I'll post that, too, I guess:

When the Titans rose up Ares sent forth his forces into the foothills to head them off. Enyalius led this force, charging forward in his shining, pegasus-drawn chariot. When they reached the foothills they found the beasts.

Tethys, mother of the waters, wife of Oceanus, had taken the children of her Tiamat and transformed them into the great rivers of Greece. Now she had taken here children back for the sake of war. Greatest and fiercest among them was Nilos, the beast who was the River Nile.

Enyalius' forces scattered at the sight of the Titaness' river beasts. Only Enyalius remained, charging alone against Nilos; a mere white speck against the colossal river beast.

You'd think I was Procrastinating...

...And that's kind of true, but I also really wanted to do a lot of digital painting in the last little while. So here's the most recent COW piece. It's for the topic "The Healer". This is a bacterial creature I invented, which seeks out and devours cancer cells. Despite, then attacking the previously affected areas, it's way easier to remove than the actual cancer. So there's that I guess. I did this in the last couple of days only, so I didn't quite get the time to work on it that I might have otherwise wanted, but I think it turned out alright considering.

Boat over the Hall of the Mountain Styx

This week I'm doing a ConceptArt.org community activity-stravaganza! Which may or may not be a terrible idea considering the amount of actual schoolwork I have. But, nevertheless, in the words of Sims and Dessa, we "Press On! Press On! You know what that's like!".

It was round 160 for both Industrial Design of the Week and Environment of the Week. I did both...
The topic for EOW was "In the Hall of the Mountain King", inspired by Greig's music. Whilst I was listening I imagined a city lining the walls of a massive cavern, the buildings all stacked atop one another precariously. Here was the result.



The topic for IDW was the Boat over the River of Styx. I imagined it as a cheesy theme park ride. The result was really heavily Grim Fandango-inspired.

A few D&D-related things (and Happy Birthday to Natalie)

Hey everyone. So for those of you that don't know, I run a weekly D&D session in a module I created using D&D e3.X as a base. Now, this christmas I wanted to give a little back to three of my players who have been with the party for the last 2 and a half years or so. I began creating a series of illustrations, but I never got around to finishing all of them.

The today is Natalie's (one of those three players') birthday. As a little present I decided to finally get the finished images printed for the party. These are those two images. The first is a poster about the original party I started with for this module's campaign. From right to left it is: Charles (played by Tavish Armstrong), Jonathan Teef (played by Nick Freeston), Grimbleshelf III (played by Natalie Black), Soren Kierkegarde (played by Cam Rockwood) and Xavier Kransk (played by Lachlan Fletcher) along with brief synopses of their characters (the synopses were sort of based off of the Scott Pilgrim school of describing characters). The second image is of Grimbleshelf III atop his faithful (late) mount, Mitze, the greatest abanse to ever traverse the Hoarshaal Mountains.





The third image here is also related to the same D&D campaign (I actually run 2 different ones). A character the party recently re-encountered for the third time, by the name of Errol Gilderine. This was a super quick character sketch... maybe 1 1/2 - 2 hours.



New environment should be coming soon. We'll see about creature of the week.

Even Goblins need a little lovin'...

So, despite slicing the fuck out of my finger the other day, I'm back to working a decent amount on my weekly drawings. I'm working on a couple of side projects, but none of those are far enough along for me to want to post. One of them the become a step-by-step on my process. I would do some video capture stuff when I'm doing a piece, but I think that would be really harsh on my processor, which already gets chuggy on PS sometimes.

Anyway, here's this week's COW piece. The topic was another one of mine: Goblin's Best Friend. The concept of the round was to create a pet for golbins that would be equivalent to what dogs are for humans ("Man's best friend"). So, here's my creature, the Bulwarf. I'm pretty satisfied with how he turned out. Think of him as the spiritual successor to my Halloween creature (with the terrible bird disguise), as I like the similar complete disregard for the world around them, and the similar palette styles and spot rendering.

Bioluminescent Invertebrate

Here's my recent entry for COW. The topic this week was one of mine: "Bioluminescent Invertebrate". I'm not super happy with the result, but I'm glad I've gotten some painting in, I've been sort of inactive of late. Tthe topic I created partly as a challenge to myself, so I'm glad I at least tried even if I failed, in my books. I probably should have used more reference than I did.