Dungeons and Drawings art stuff (new: Nixie)

[1nfinite zer0]

baaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh, my brain is melting. these are SO GOOD!
you are such talented artists! it's making me really happy to see these monsters interpreted in such a variety of styles beyond those we traditionally lump with fantasy. so thanks! i will continue to watch with bated breath.

[Exit]

The second guest week has officially concludes. Besides the Banshee, our guest have illustrated the following monsters:

-Wolf-In-Sheep's-Clothing, a silly monster of old; a tree stump with tentacles with a false rabbit on its head
-Etheral Filcher, a strangely shaped, multi-armed, single-legged interdimensional pickpocket
-Blackstone Gigant, gargantuan floating jet statue in the form of a demonic woman
-Bog Giant, crocodile-hunting/woshipping swamp denizens
-Kuo-Toa, evil amphibious frog-fish-things covered in slime and with a ridiculous language
-Crypt Thing, an undead guardian of sacred sites with annoying teleportation magic

[Ninjaman]

Thats what this is

[Tengu_temp]

That bog giant. Probably my favorite picture of all the guest art.

[Exit]

That bog giant. Probably my favorite picture of all the guest art.

My personal favorites are the Peryton, closely followed by the Orcwort and Ethereal Filcher. Thought I do like the cowering crocodiles in the foreground of the Bog Giant picture. That's some good comedy.

[Tengu_temp]

I really like "big creature in the mist" pictures. Adding mist already makes a picture 20% cooler to me.

[Exit]

Back with out post guest-week image. This week we've decided to do prestige classes, which resulted couple more of characters that we've played in past campaigns. Mine is Xylia Glass, an Alienist, a quite flavourful prestige class from the Complete Arcane book. I didn't get to play her for long; I played her in one of these PbP games on these forums that kinda crapped out before it even started.

Joe's image is an Invisible Blade, a prestige class that designed to be very knify-bluffy and very little anything else. He was actually a pretty fun little halfling character that he played in a campaign of mine (which also crapped out before it even started. Bad first-time GMing on my part). The most memorable part is him being in a jail cell being attacked by gnoll bandits on the other side of the bars. He pickpocketed an arrow out of their quivers and proceeded to stab them to death. Jolly good show.

Also, for any artists that are looking at this forum, I've started a new blog. I needed a way to archive all the reference images that I've got stored up on my computer, so they're all going to be going up on Reference Reference. Check it out.

[Exit]

Lateness on our part for Dungeons and Drawings. We've got ourselves some extra work that's gonna be quite neat. Well, Joe has work that's gonna be quite neat; I'm mostly job hunting.

Any-diddly-way, here's our stuffs: the Wang-Liang, an intelligent bestial giant of oriental inspiration, and a Living Blasphemy, a spell that's gained independence and become a 15-foot tall whirlwind of unholyness. Hot dog! It's actually a monster created using the Living Spell template, so you can go pretty wild with that.

[Tengu_temp]

Those really look like they came out of Samurai Jack. And I mean that in a good way.

[Exit]

Both pictures are from me this time (this week and last week), since Joe's been busy with a couple of other projects. Anyway, last week I did an Air Primal, the ultimate Air Elemental, challenge rating 35 (!!!). This week's monster is the Xac-Yij, one of a group of weird elemental jellyfish called Energons.

I've also been going to a few Maya classes for the past few months, learning how to model characters and etcetera. I've been modelling a little goblin, and you can check my progress on the blog. Also on the blog is a fancy new poll, where you can tell us which type of monster you'd like to see us do next. It closes on the 29th, so ya'll better get clickity-clicking.

[Tengu_temp]

I'm surprised I'm the only one who voted for giants so far. I can't think of any of your giant pictures that wasn't made of win. Maybe I just like giants.

"Giant" slowly stops sounding like a word.

[Exit]

I'm surprised I'm the only one who voted for giants so far. I can't think of any of your giant pictures that wasn't made of win. Maybe I just like giants.

"Giant" slowly stops sounding like a word.

Towards the end giant started getting a couple of more votes, but not enough to topple outsiders, which were the ultimate winners.

I'll post the image for the week tomorrow. There's currently a new poll up for the next creature. This time the question is I open the dungeon door. The monster I see...

[Exit]

Presenting the winner of last week's poll: the Mercane, the blue-skinned interdimensional vendors. If you want it, they got it.

Remember to vote on the new poll! I'm enjoying this poll bidness.

[Exit]

The winner for this week's poll was "wants to help me" and the creature fitting that description was the Domovoi, from Frostburn, a little hairy man of Slavic folklore that keeps fires warm. This is good when you're out in the middle of the freezing tundra.

This week's poll is to help me pick the terrain for next week's creature. You can actually select multiple answers in this poll, so we'll see what happens. Maybe two answers will get the same amount of votes and I'll have to combine them into the same image. I've also posted up some more work on that little 3d goblin model, this time with eyes and teeth and such.

[Tvtyrant]

Dear lord is your art amazing! I wish you would do a Tsochari though.

[Exit]

Dear lord is your art amazing! I wish you would do a Tsochari though.

I really, really like Tsochari (or any other kind of parasitic monster like the Jahl), but we're avoiding doing aberrations for a while. Mostly because it'd be so easy to only do aberrations since they're so dang cool. I'll add that one to my list of preferred monsters through in case the polls ever "force" me to do it.

[Exit]

Howdy howdy.

The winner for last week's poll was city-based monsters. I went and chose the Kenku, an evil yet adorable race of flightless tiny crow-like humanoids. I could have drawn them stealing treasure or whatever, but they's birds, yo. Birds are mean when you leave unattened food lying around.

Sorry about the lateness. The poll for this week is adventure mode. Go vote on that sheedeeleedoo.

More work's been done on that goblin model I've been working on for the past month. I've been doing facial blend shapes, which is what you use to help build expressions on a 3d model. They're really fun to build. Next thing will be the blend shapes on the cheeks, eyes and forehead, then figuring out how to make some more advanced controls for them.

Spoiler

Show

[Serpentine]

Hehee. Cool. Didn't know Kenku were tiny...

[Tengu_temp]

My kin! Seal of approval.

[Ninjaman]

I love them

[Exit]

The winner's of last week's poll was high fantasy diplomatic mission. Your objective? Make peace with the slave-loving Yakfolk of the mountain over yonder. Perhaps you can offer them one of your town's most beautifully crafted sheathes for their magic staffs.

The poll for the week is regarding the cultural and mythological influences in the monsters of D&D. So far, the results are pretty pleasing and force me to search through the books for an appropriate image. But over the last few polls there's been a clear winner for the first few days, only for one with less votes to suddenly rocket ahead.

And, of course, there's some more 3d progress for y'all so see this week.

[Tengu_temp]

THOSE TEETH.

I like the picture. In addition to your usual style, the palette choice reminds me of La-Mulana.

[Exit]

Hey there y'all. Holy smokes I'm late! Like a whole week late!

I'm going to try to do this week's monster really quickly (white and one color, either black or red) so I can be all up to date.

Anyway, the winner of the previous poll was Middle Eastern/Indian and North American-inspired monsters. I decided to go for North American because that culture is under-represented in fantasy gaming. So I did the Wendigo, the representant of cold winters and the merciless wild. I tried to use the hidden faces illusion trick (Wendigos have a supernatural ability called Corner of the Eye that means sometimes they can't be looked at directly).

Oh snap! Look who's back! It's Joe, bringing us one of my favourite monsters from the Epic Level Handbook: the Gloom, the silent assassin.

[Tengu_temp]

The Wendigo looks like something out of a darker version of a Miyazaki movie. Very good.

The Gloom's expression amused me. The creature looks like it came out of Spy vs Spy.

[Exit]

Hey y'all. Posting creatures up for this past couple of weeks. Presenting the Terror Bird (I can't remember what the poll answer was for this one) and the Necropolitan (the princess is dead!). One's little more than a prehistoric carnivorous ostrich with a dramatic name, and the other's a sentient zombie.

No poll this week because next week's special. It's going to be the one-year anniversary of Dungeons & Drawings. We're going to be doing gods. I'm going to try double-hard to get Joe to do something for it. I think his work load's become a little bit more manageable.

[smuchmuch]

Once again there' seem to a noticable influence of masks in your artwork. (at least that the impression I get from seeing your unded face here.)

[Exit]

Oh wow! Dungeons and Drawings is now one whooooole year old. (Yay) We decided to celebrate by making illustrations of the gods of the D&D pantheon. I've done the most famous one, Pelor, god of the sun and good things. Joe's done Wee Jas, goddess of death and magic, roiling in some sort of horrific arcane womb. Originally he was going to do Boccob, since that was one of his favourite gods, but was immensely disappointed when he did some research on him. Instead of being some cosmic abstract force of magic, Boccob's just some ascended wizard. LAME.

Wait what? We've hit our 100th post too? I think there's an internet law somewhere that says we have to do something about that.

[Tengu_temp]

Very cool. I like the decidedly non-standard, nonhuman design.

[Serpentine]

I'd love to see more Mesoamerican stuff done in that style...
The Wee Jas is wonderful, too.

[Exit]

Iiiiiiit's DRAGON MONTH over at Dungeons & Drawings. To celebrate our 100th post, for the rest of August we're gonna be posting nothing but dragons, dragons, dragons.

The first two dragons we've tackled are the Gold Dragon and the Green Dragon. We've made some attempts at being original in our design, but they still look like fairly typical dragons. I also have to confess that the Green Dragon isn't 100% done; it's still missing some of the intended shading. I present to you my excuse that at work I'm drawing at a desktop all day and when I get home my eyes and back are too tired to focus on something as fiddly as pixel art.

Still going to finish is properly at some point.

I've also started a new tagging system over at Reference Reference, my other blog. So now you can check out what pictures I looked at when I drew the green dragon.