Only a quick post today as it’s late and I’m in the middle of a fast so I don’t feel like writing too much right now.  I have been collaborating with a friend on monster illustrations for Heroes of Ismia and he has been producing some pretty awesome stuff. I’ll share the results of our combined efforts on the site soon. Today I decided to take a break from the card and mechanics development and illustrate a monster of my own.  Here is the result.

A few posts ago I shared an illustration of a female fighter I was in the middle of. In this post I’d like to show how the pencil drawing turned out, then give a couple of tips on how to color a pencil drawing in Photoshop for a nice cartoony result.

Starting with the finished, shaded pencil drawing, use the magnetic lasso tool to mask off the character you wish to color.  Go to “Select>Save Selection” so you can easily retrieve your mask if you accidentally de-select it. For more precise control I sometimes make a separate mask for each color, but on this drawing I simply masked off the outline and carefully colored the interior colors. Here is the fully shaded illustrating with the selection mask applied.

An optional step to create a nicer gradient in the shading and fade some of the sharper pencil lines is to apply a blur filter. Duplicate the layer to preserve the original image. At this point I also painted everything outside the mask white (not mandatory, but I like the cleanness). Now, with you pencil drawing selected, go to “Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur” and apply with a radius of 1 to 2. This not only smudges your pencil lines, it helps take out any white area left in the drawing. Pure white won’t apply tone to the color layer and will remain pure white in the final illustration.

Now create a new layer and change the layer type to “Color.” As you apply your color to this layer, the blurred pencil drawing will create the tone. In areas where the color isn’t as saturated as I’d like, or in places I need some more shading, I use the burn tool on the blurred layer. Here is what the color layer looks like alone and with the values applied with the blurred layer. Notice that the values in the “color” layer are much more saturated than on the combined illustration. Keep this in mind when you are shading your illustration with pencil before scanning it into Photoshop.

And here is the final version. I’m really looking forward to putting this on the character sheets. I’ll post the other classes as I finish them. In the mean time, please feel free to ask questions or share your own work in the comments section.

After play testing Heroes of Ismia last week, my friend requested that I change the Fighter character sheet illustration from the cliche male dwarf fighter to a human female. Here is the result of that conversation.  There’s still some work to be done in detail and shading especially in the armor. I think the next female fighter I illustrate will have more realistic armor.  While I avoid resorting to drawing the chainmail bikini at all times, I find it difficult as a male to draw full armor on my female models… A weakness I’ll have to address as I further illustrate “Heroes of Ismia.”

I’ve been doing some illustrations of the character classes for Ismia to use on the character sheets.  This is an inked drawing of the Cleric character sheet.  When I sat down to illustrate these characters, I hadn’t drawn humans for some time so it’s definitely a bit rough. As my own worst critic, I’d say she’s got a pretty good set of thunder thighs, and if I were to do the drawing again, I would tone that down a little.  Also, the wind blowing her cape and hair doesn’t seem to be touching her banner… Ah well.  Back to the drawing board.

More character illustrations will follow soon.

This is an illustration I made for the melee classes in the Heroes of Ismia board game I am developing.  As the game components near completion, the class symbols will be used for quick visual comparison between the characters and the challenges they are attempting to complete.

Each character class will have two key images associated with their damage types. Fighters will be Physical and Melee, Rogues are Physical and either Ranged or Melee according to build, Clerics are Magical and Melee, and Wizards are Magical and Ranged.

Illustrating the other damage types is my current project and will be posted as soon as I complete them.

Posts in this section will be focussed mostly on cellulose and graphite.  I’ll discuss current challenges, ideas, and breakthroughs in the design and development of the board games I’m working on.  It will also be a gallery of my illustrations for said projects.