Lord of the Rings Cards

Some cards I did for Fantasy Flight Games's Lord of the Rings decks have been released so here they are!

A Goblin Lurker for the Into the Pit Nightmare Expansion deck.

And a Prowling Wolf for the Voice of Isengard Expansion deck. Hope you like em!

A New Year (and Ringwraiths)!

Happy 2014 everyone! Sorry it's been quiet recently. I've been slowing chiseling away at this new drawing. As you can see, it's in a medium and surface that I haven't really used all that much: pencils, white charcoal on toned paper.
It's a new look and clearly, I have a lot of work to adapt to this new style, but I think it has a lot of potential.

Painting Video

Hi everyone! Just got done with a ton of freelance work that I will be showing off shortly. In the meantime, I just wanted to show off my latest project, my first painting video!

You'll be able to see how I painted a pivotal scene in Lord of the Rings, Gandalf confronting the Balrog from start to finish. I describe how I set up the file, use reference, etc. It's a good 20 minutes long and I hope, informative and helpful. 

Here's the finished painting from that scene!

Mûmakil

Hi! I'm a bit behind on posts, but today's post is something special. A job I did for Fantasy Flight Games was released last month as part of the Lord of the Rings Card Game. More specifically, this is for the Heirs of Númenor expansion.

I was really honored to be asked to paint a Mûmakil, one of the most iconic creatures from Tolkien's great works. We weren't permitted to use New Line Cinema's designs, as Fantasy Flight only has license with Middle Earth Entertainment and not NLC. Therefore, our designs could not resemble the movies in any way. I was more than happy with that as I wanted to come up with my own look and culture. I knew I wanted my Mumak to be heavily armored, wicked, yet exotic and cultured. Oh, and it had to have tusks. Big tusks. I ended up using Greek, Indian, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian sources. 

I included a lot of gold to give a sense of opulence. The armor is taken from Indian horse armor. The wavy spikes are a classic Thai architectural feature. The red standard is a reference to the Serpent Lord.

Here's the final card, as taken from the Fantasy Flight website.

Eowyn and the Nazgul

Sorry it's been a while! I've been slaving away at the latest ArtOrder challenge. It's been a while since I did ArtOrder, so I wanted to make sure this one was good. And what an awesome challenge! Depict the battle between Eowyn and the Witch King from the Return of the King.

Naturally, I gravitated towards giving the Fell Beast a lot of attention!

Here are some of the progress sketches. Note how eager I was towards making the Fell Beast HUGE before the good folks at Muddy Colors reined me back in.