Category Archives: Illustration

Drawing the Monster Manual #14: Green Hag

#14 in my quest to draw the entire 5th Edition Monster Manual: The Green Hag!

Hags are cool. Creepy witches in the woods tricking you into deals that backfire spectacularly, and cackling at your ruin. I don’t know why, but I’ve always liked witches. I’m looking forward to throwing some of these ladies at my players some time soon, perhaps! They’re supposed to be repulsively ugly, but I think this one came out kinda charming somehow. Oh well!

So when I started this series, I intended to ultimately use these drawings for paper miniatures. However, at this point, I think I’ve abandoned that idea. Drawing paper minis is so restrictive in so many ways, because you have to have the front match up with the back perfectly for when you print and assemble them. You’re pretty much stuck with a straight-on camera angle, and they either have be standing right on the ground with both feet, or you gotta do some janky workarounds. I like to put some hints of environment into these drawings, and trying to do them for minis makes that difficult. So having decided to forgo that plan, I’ve now gone a little overboard and let the hints of environment start to turn into a full background. Well, you gotta have the little witch hut, right? I tried to let it blend into the parchment texture in the background. I don’t know if it works, but hey, you gotta try things.

D&D Feywild Commission

Here’s a piece I did recently featuring a couple of D&D characters confronting a Mind Flayer in the Feywild! Why is there a Mind Flayer in the Feywild? To be honest, I don’t know, but it can’t be anything good!

This was a fun piece to work on. My first time drawing the Feywild. It’s fun to do that overgrown nature thing, with the strange colors, and the big mushrooms and whatnot. I’m not sure I captured it completely how I imagined it, but it’s a start! This piece was also the culmination of my experiments with a more “painted” coloring style, vs. the “airbrush cuts” typical of comic book coloring that I usually use. I like the look, and I thought it would be a more efficient way to handle all of the vegetation, but it ended up being more time-consuming than usual. Currently, I’ve gone back to the basics for the time being.

 

Blasting Out of Avernus in a Howler-drawn Carriage, Pursued by Biker Duergar and Infernal Machines!

Here’s a commission I finished recently for a Descent Into Avernus D&D campaign. The party is fleeing from an army of biker Duergar and Infernal Machines, in (and on) a carriage pulled by a Howler that’s been fed a growth potion. Just really fun stuff all around!

Drawing the Monster Manual #13: Grell!

#13 in my quest to draw the entire 5th Edition Monster Manual: The Grell!

Lucky number 13, and I couldn’t have rolled a cuddlier little guy. What the hell is this thing? A beaked brain with barbed tentacles? Gross. But also undeniably awesome. Of course it’s from the Underdark!

I’m struck by how many D&D monsters are just a weird combination of different animals and different body parts. Hey, don’t mess with what works, right?

Drawing the Monster Manual #10: Doppelganger

Number 10 in my quest to draw the entire 5th Edition Monster Manual: The Doppelganger!

Doppelganger is kind of a weird one, because the whole point is that it’s a monster that takes on the appearance of other people. Its true form is apparently a kind of nondescript, slightly melty purple dude. Different art depics it in different ways — the 5th Edition Monster Manual has it as a very humanoid figure. Other sou rces depict it in a stranger way, often with big “grey alien” eyes, or with an overgrown, misshapen shoulder girdle, and spikes growing out all over.

Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m planning on producing paper minis out of this series. I’m looking forward to using this guy in my game soon!

Drawing the Monster Manual #9: Fire Giant

Number 9 in my quest to draw the entire 5th Edition Monster Manual — the Fire Giant! I got a nasty flu last week (and hiccups for almost a week besides) so it’s been a while since I’ve released one of these, but I’m back at it! Can’t stop this train! I’ve actually been sitting on the sketch for this one for months, and it kinda got lost on my tablet. Finally got around to finishing it up. I struggled a little with the armor design — the Fire Giants in the book, and most of the ones you can find on the internet all have that dark, monochrome armor, and I felt like it was a tough to make it look good. To that end, I added a little bit of red cloth, which helped. I guess I don’t have a lot else to say about fire giants. Never used one in game — still far too early in my DM career to be using such high CR creatures. But like I’ve mentioned before, I plan to format all of these as paper minis eventually, and I would like to use it one of these days!

Drawing the Monster Manual #8: Noble

Number 8 in my quest to draw the entire 5th Edition Monster Manual: The Noble!

What’s that you say? A noble isn’t a monster? Well, you’re right about that — arguably. This is D&D after all, and I’m sure many of the nobles that appear in our games are downright monstrous! (In fact, this guy is roughly based on Lord Urien Dumay, an NPC in my game who’s a real piece of work.) But this isn’t a project about drawing just the monsters from the Monster Manual — this is about drawing every damn thing in the book. So I’ll keep rolling dice for page numbers, and drawing whatever comes up!

Dark Sun party hanging out in the tavern!

Here’s another recent D&D commission. This party is hanging out in a tavern in the Dark Sun setting — a classic D&D setting (as-yet unreleased for 5e) of a blasted world ruled over by warring sorcerer kings. I think seeing D&D ads featuring Brom’s Dark Sun artwork in comic books in the early 90s is probably one of my strongest old D&D memories. Very cool stuff, if a bit on the S&M side?

Here’s a very challenging D&D piece I completed recently. The commissioner was a DM running two campaigns for two parties respectively, and he wanted both in the same scene, but with wildly different backgrounds — the desert sandstorm of White Plume Mountain, and the underground tunnels of Forge of Fury — with the DM conjuring a dragon in front of both parties. What’s more, he also wanted two additional versions with just one party and the DM. That required some additional drawing, as well as a lot of planning and experimentation with my coloring process especially, to separate it all out in the end. So like I said, a big challenge! But a very welcome one, which made this piece very interesting to work on.