Wolf Hunger

This is another piece for the Call of Cthulhu card game by Fantasy Flight Games. It's been made for the Silver Twilight cycle expansion almost a year ago. It was my first CoC illustration, and I made it with Richard Vass. Let me show you some insider stuff.

Assignment: A man in a ferocious rage is attacking the viewer, his mouth salivating and his eyes yellow. Although his ripped clothing is that of a respectable 1920s businessman, his mind is completely overcome with desperate, bestial hunger.

The first rough by Richard. It's been drawn with pencil, the tones added in Sketchbook.

I colorized the sketch in Photoshop and sent it to the FFG folks.

After the approval of the sketch Richard did this pencil base for the final painting.

Wolf Hunger, the finalized illustration for the card. I painted it in Photoshop.
© 2010-2011 Fantasy Flight Games

Comic strip speed painting

Nowadays I'm a full time artist at Twisted Tribe, working on Nadirim, and one of my collegues is Richard Vass. We create some short comic strips for the game - check our working process out:

Hundredwars

This is the cover of the novel "Hundredwars" by John J. Sherwood. I worked with Richard Vass on it again. The following is a walkthrough how we created this painting.

After we received the details from the publisher, we talked a lot about the options, the potential scenes, the compositional schemes we could use. In the story you can read about the war between the gentle elves and the demonic breed of the aquirs. Both of the species use flying battle ships: the ships of the elves are beautiful, the aquir ones are living meat monstrosities and lava vessels. And there are also dragons in friendship with the good forest people in the novel. Well, we were thinking a lot about the story and then Richard drew these thumbnail sketches. On the first one you can see the final cover in a rough phase: a fallen aquir battle ship and a dragon who attacks it. On the second one there is an aquir chief on his ship, watching some antagonistic dragons flying. The publisher and the author chose the first one.

Richard made the graphics on the basis of the sketch. He drew the dragon and the ship separately, then scanned the pages and gave me a PSD file with two layers. You know I use Photoshop on an iMac, an ancient Wacom tablet and rough metal music.

I played with the dragon and finally flipped it. Kept the graphics on a multiply layer and underpainted it with gray tones. If you paint this way, you can manage the tones easily without take care of the colors.

I added some basic colors to the image. I wanted to illustrate the difference between the meat vessel and the reptile.

At first I worked on the details of the aquir ship and the mountain top. I tried to paint some distance with using of blue tones, because the ship is a really huge beasty and it's far from the dragon (witch is a huge beasty, too).

I wanted the fire to be the focus of the image. When I painted it I used some photos of napalm explosions as references. I think it looks good in front of that purple and blue background.

At the end I finalized the dragon then I painted some tiny flying bat-like creatures in the background. They are aquirs. Or dragons. Or both...

It's the finalized cover painting. I flipped it and made some little modifications: hit the ship with a lightning strike (I guess it comes from the elves), made color corrections, and heal the right... no, the left wing of the dragon.

The book went to the stores with this typography. It's published by Delta Vision, you can read it only in Hungarian.

Orc chief

This is how we roll: pencils by Richard Vass, grey tones by me. 13Mann Verlags, Rolemaster, "Der Blutende Gott".

Some brutes and a pixel pixie

1:1 details from the awakened Australia, from the pages of the Shadowrun: Sixth World Almanac sourcebook.

Neonet Transys Experiments

Another piece for the Shadowrun: Corporate Guide sourcebook - the finalized illustration and the sketch.

Ares Bug Biodrone

This was my very first piece for Shadowrun. I made it in May 2009, and it's published in the Corporate Guide sourcebook.

Some curiosities: my first sketch, and Shadowrun Art Director Brent Evans' edits:

Possessed shaman

The grayscale basic and the colored, finished picture. I used more textures and adjustment layers because I'm trying another way to color and develop an illustration.

1:1 details of Hurakan

Hurakan is the largest digital painting I ever did. Its size is 5906 x 4303 px, 50 x 36,43 cm (19.7" x 14.3"). Let me show you some details.

Now and then

One of my first sketches of the fumbler magician Ash (Pernye) from 2006...

...and the cover illustration for PinkHell magazine issue 6, 2009.

Captain Hungary, detailed color sketch

Check out the first rough sketch here.

Captain Hungary, 1st sketch

Rododa whatsits

An illustration from the Toron sourcebook, and the sketch I did in 2004. They'are the weird Toronian rododa actors. Or actresses, who knows.

Sea goblin

This little guy is one of my favourites. Unfortunatelly I had no possibilities to work out this undersea people. You can see some steps of their evolution below.

Bear hunting

Sketch and finished(?) artwork, made for the forthcoming M.A.G.U.S. sourcebook.

Hunger

Description: A Wendigo and a Dzoo-noo-qua wrestling over a tasty morsel of human flesh, claws locked in combat. Possibly have ghouls watching on, crouched in the shadows.

The sketch for the Running Wild illustration. Click here for the finished one.

Rooftop Meal

Description: A pack of gargoyles gathers around the indistinct remains of a meal on the rooftop of a social housing project, covered in graffiti and pockmarked with age. One of the gargoyles in the foreground is tearing the meat that’s still attached to the shoulder joint of a cyberlimb.

Earlier gargoyle illustrations by Jim Nelson
(from the Critters and Paranormal Animals of North America sourcebooks)

Some gargoyles - just for inspiration

The sketch

I received this comment from the Shadowrun development team about the sketch : "One might have a blunt canine snout, another a leonine aspect, and a third might have a beak, instead of a mouth. Essentially, gargoyles resemble the traditional statuary. Just as most examples of the statues look substantially different, it’d be great if these did as well."

The final illustration from the Shadowrun - Running Wild sourcebook

Nemere sketches

The three sketches and the final cover art