Frost Giant Groundwork

The last time I worked with Tyler Jacobson as my mentor for an illustration, the results were pretty good - so when I spoke to him at Illuxcon and he asked me if I'd be interested in doing another one, I jumped on the chance.

My process is a lot different than it was almost a year ago. There's no perfect drawing to show yet, because I just finished shooting my reference (where 'finished' might be a very generous term), but I've done the prep work that should make the painting itself go smoother.

This is a barbarian woman and a rogue fighting a frost giant. It's a D&D art order, like the Elf Cleric, but as before Tyler's letting me use it as a point of departure as opposed to a part of an accepted canon. To that end, I purposefully did not look at the descriptions for the Rogue or Barbarian classes, nor for Frost Giants. When I read the piece's description, all I could see was Jesper Ejsing's paintings in my head - and while I should be so lucky to have his handle on color and action, and in the end don't have anything approaching his sensibility, I wanted to stay as far as possible from making an illustration that looked like an Ejsing knockoff in a low-chroma palette.

 

Speaking of low-chroma palettes, I'm going to be trying one of the warmer ones - probably the last study of the set - with upped cool tones in the frost giant itself and touches of it elsewhere.

The next thing to do is the drawing, though with the IMC coming up and work starting soon, we'll see how fast I get that done.