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?
Number four in my quest to draw the whole 5th Edition Monster Manual: The Banshee! According to D&D lore, a Banshee is the spirit of a female elf who, in life, used her beauty for evil ends, and in death is cursed to roam the place of her demise, weeping and wailing, reliving every moments of her life with perfect recall. In the Irish mythology that the Banshee derives from, she’s called a “fairy woman”, and the possible reasons for her curse are more diverse.
Third in my series of creatures from the D&D 5th Edition Monster Manual, we have the Griffon! It’s interesting how many monsters are just mashups of different animals! I guess that is pretty monstrous. I used to be terrible at drawing animals, but somewhere along the line, I guess I got to be pretty alright. A couple years back I illustrated a children’s book about an island full of tiny people who ride seagulls, so I really had to dig into how to draw birds, which came in handy here!
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!
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.
Here’s a cool Curse of Strahd commission I recently had the chance to do. It was commissioned to commemorate the end of the campaign, and immortalizes the triumphs and epic fails of the party, such as taking over a town, punching your way out of a shambling mound, accidentally burning down a windmill with a bunch of kids inside, accidentally drowning a bunch of ravens who were actually people, accidentally blowing up a wagon, and taking advice from a talking sword. And of course, Strahd himself looms over the whole thing. 
Artistically, it was a big challenge to fit this many characters, with this many bits of “business”, onto the page in some kind of coherent composition, all while giving each character the “screen time” they deserve. I think it ultimately came out very nicely, but it took a lot of messing around to get it there!
Here’s a fun D&D commission (Well, Pathfinder technically, but same difference!) with a cool adventuring party in Magnimar, the City of Monuments. (My favorite part is the Monkey Goblin hanging from the gate!)
