Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mighty Ground Pounders End-of-Campaign Poster

Here’s a huge illustration I had the opportunity to do recently for a D&D group to celebrate the ending of their two-year-long campaign. It features the whole party, their airship, the main villains, and a bunch of their favorite NPCs.

I got to try out a new coloring process on this one, using my newly-developed digital painting skills to bring more depth and variety to the rendering. I’m really pleased with how it came out.

My favorite detail about this piece is the Mindflayer head in a jar on the back of the evil wizard in the foreground. They sent me an update of their final sessions showing how that turned out, since I when I finished the piece, they still had a couple of sessions left. That Mindflayer head became a Mindflayer giant for the final battle, with a mini on the table that must’ve been a foot tall!

Peaceful Dwarf Rogue From The Sealed City Who Was Petrified For Over Two Hundred Years

A character inspired by the D&D character concept generator, http://www.whothefuckismydndcharacter.com. A Peaceful Dwarf Rogue From The Sealed City Who Was Petrified For Over Two Hundred Years. In the interest of getting more of that concept  into the art, I went ahead and made him look like he’s still a bit petrified. Maybe when you’re petrified for over 200 years, you never quite go back to normal –how would I know?

Grouchy Gnome Bard From The Local Tavern Who Hates The Monarchy

I decided to paint some characters suggested by the delightful D&D character idea generator, https://whothefuckismydndcharacter.com/.  Here we’ve got a Grouchy Gnome Bard From The Local Tavern Who Hates The Monarchy. She’s a bit of a one-gnome-band. She came out looking a bit more sly than grouchy, but if you check out the lute, she clearly hates the monarchy! Going forward, I think it’s going to be interesting trying to show all of the suggested elements in the image.

Drawing the Monster Manual #11: Bronze Dragon Wyrmling

#11 in my quest to draw the entire D&D 5th Edition Monster Manual: The Bronze Dragon Wyrmling!

So this whole pandemic/lockdown kinda threw me off my game for this project. Funny how that works — you’d think with all the extra time at home, you’d get so much done, but in my experience and observation, it’s worked out quite the opposite. (Must be that creeping existential terror!) But anyway, I’m back on the case now!

This is the first dragon of any kind that I’ve drawn for this project, but certainly not the last. I’m playing with some new coloring techniques — more of a painted style of rendering, rather than the “airbrush cuts” comic book style I’ve typically used. We’ll see how it goes!

D&D Commission: Outside the Yawning Portal

Here’s a little commission I did a while back, featuring a small party outside the Yawning Portal in Waterdeep. This group was a dad DMing for his kids, which might help explain the prevalence of pets in the party — but then again, I think that happens with a lot of groups!

 

Drawing the Monster Manual #6: Planetar

Number 6 in my quest to draw the entire 5th Edition Monster Manual — the Planetar! These guys are huge angelic warriors with green skin for some reason. Who knows?  It’s D&D, and D&D is pretty weird sometimes.  I probably wouldn’t have picked this one to draw any time soon, but I’m rolling randomly for them, so you get what you get. I guess it beats drawing all the cool stuff in the beginning, and being stuck with a bunch of weird stuff I’m not that interested in at the end!

Traveling D&D Party

 

Hoo boy, this one was a challenge! A lot of characters, a lot of character details, a lot of “business”, like the water genasi warlock pilfering a magical D30 from the dragonborn paladin’s pouch.  Just a lot of stuff to fit into in the image. Very challenging, but worth it, because I think it came out very nicely, and the clients were very pleased.  Most of the D&D party commissions I do are either an action scene of some kind, or a “group photo” where everyone just poses and looks cool. And those are great! But it was a nice change of pace to depict a quiet moment of travel, so often glossed over in our games as well as in our art!

Here’s a really fun D&D commission I did a couple months back. The commissioner’s group was putting their regular game on hold for a Halloween session where their characters would encounter a fantasy version of a stereotypical Italian restaurant — a CANNIBAL Italian restaurant, run by the evil Tony Linguine and his staff of drunken goblins — and the PCs are on the menu (literally)!

Thanks for looking, and if you want to see more, you can check out my website at http://www.brandonpalas.com!

Children of the Blood Star

Here’s a recent commission — a poster for a D&D campaign called Children of the Blood Star. The heroes (the titular children, I assume) stand in front of the campaign’s main city, a flurry of red lanterns rising into the air, with the evil Zolph looming in the background above them. His broken skull contains The Void. The titular Blood Star can be seen over his shoulder.

I love doing these poster-style commissions! I’m not exactly a graphic designer, but these heavy metal-ish hand-drawn titles are a blast.

Velira Splinth

Been feeling the itch to get on the other side of the DM screen for a change, so I dropped into a D&D Adventurers League game at my local gaming store. You always hear horror stories about the kinds of weirdos you can run into at public games, so I was a little apprehensive, but everyone at the table was great.

I played human rogue Velira Splinth. She’s a former burglar, but she’s going straight, and taking up the comparatively honest profession of adventuring. She was hastily thrown together by grabbing a name I liked from my notebook. No complex backstory, but just the name gave me enough of a sense of who she was to have some fun with a terrible cockney accent!

A recent commission. A couple of Half-elf adventurers, preparing for battle! He’s a Great Old One warlock whose patron is a big blue sun that appears to him but never speaks, and he summons his pact weapon by pulling it out of a black (blue?) hole. She’s a glamour bard who was raised in the feywild, and here we see in her in her Mantle of Majesty, just beating the world into submission with her radiant beauty.