Planar Standoff

It's been a rough few weeks, first with non-stop work, and now with a few days vacation, after which I will return home and be grinding away for a couple more weeks until things return to normal, maybe.

In the meantime, a new painting has been added to my gallery, which was used as a chapter-start illustration for the recent Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide 2. It had all sorts of challenges--taking place in an aether, on shards of floating ice, floating boulders, multiple figures, a floating river of lava (!) and nebula. The full art, including a detail view, can be found here. It is 24x30", the largest painting I've done in awhile, and sort of necessitated by the number of things that needed to be portrayed. I used canvas on board for the first time in years, too, simply because there was no time to special order my usual Hardbord at that size. I also got a jump on the painting by doing a first pass of painting in Acrylic, before whipping out the oil for the balance of the painting. Lots of different things involved in this one.

Below is the value study submitted to the Art Director, which itself was composited from multiple pencil drawings, and then rendered in Painter IX. It was a bit of a puzzle getting all the elements in. I submit sketches for this format by placing them in a dummy layout that Wizards provided, showing how the image sits on the spread. With 1/3 of the image sitting on one side of the page gutter, and the gutter itself running right down it, it's important to compose in a way that activates the left third but isn't overly disrupted by the gutter. That's two more things to consider, on top of the assignment specs above.