Eladrin Concept Art

In the summer of '07, I was commissioned by Wizards of the Coast to do a little supplemental concept art for their then-in-production 4th Edition reboot of Dungeons and Dragons. William O'Connor was doing the bulk of the heavy lifting on that project, but I was asked to do some concepts for the new Eladrin race, basically described as Elves with tweaks. I did 5 character class examples.

The thing with concept art is that most of it gets buried--it's used for consistency between artists, but doesn't often get published for public consumption. But Art Director Jon Schindehette just posted a style guide article regarding the Eladrin on his furiously-updated blog, "ArtOrder." My Eladrin Wizard and Rogue are the bottom two pencil drawings in the post. And since I'm adding sketches for my new site, I've added the Eladrin Wizard!

My and William's concepts have different takes on the Eladrin, and other artists have generally produced Eladrin that are hybrids of the two. Because the physical differences were few in contrast to regular elves, I chose to focus on the clothing aspects for differentiation. The main visual cues I used were large star (more like starfish) patterns, never centrally embroidered, but always partially "off frame," always falling outside the fabric border. As if the fabric was trimmed from a much larger sheet that did have the full star design on it. As well, the decorative aspects of their clothing and ornamentation were a part of the original descriptions. So another cue I added was that all hems and vertical fabric trims are *never* cut straight, but always in curves. You can see both of these cues in both drawings, and I repeated them across the other concepts, and on armor. Oh yeah, I had Eladrin weapons never symmetrical, their handles for instance always bend or flow.