Saturday, June 25, 2011

Felldrakes


This digital illustration from the recently released D&D supplement, Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale shows a collection of creatures called felldrakes (in fantasy settings, drakes are reptilian creatures related to dragons). Each of these drakes had it's own size, color and characteristics and it was my job to collect them all into a cohesive illustration. Hopefully, I've managed to do that here.

Borrowing a compositional technique from the old masters, I made sure to put the heads of the drakes at different levels. This keeps the eye moving around the picture, as do the curves of tails and horns. The sizes and colors of these drakes were predetermined so I tried to turn those traits to my advantage, using the blue of the largest drake to frame the orange drake, the orange to frame the green drake in the foreground, etc. It was a real challenge but I was happy with the results and all those scales were fun to paint!

2 comments:

  1. These are looking great!
    I'm a bit of a fan of felldrakes - useful to throw at players when dragons are too tough, and easier to play - proper brutish creatures. I like the fact that you've got a dungeon wall in there as well.
    Presumably they're all looking at the stat block. ;)

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  2. Thank you, Billiam. That comment about the stat block cracked me up.

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