What:
Long story short, I salvaged a failed tabletop game company and made it my own. That included picking up two successfully funded, but unfulfilled Kickstarters, which I am fulfilling out of pocket in order to maintain control of the properties. It's an investment and a LOT of work for one person, but I think it could be worth it in the end. This image was created for the Promised Sands Setting book, by Harsh Realities, which will use the Sixcess game system. It is of a Loshad warrior kneeling in reverence to something or someone. The horse-like humanoids called Loshad are a deeply spiritual tribal desert people who contend they were not born of T'nah, but rather originated on another planet in another realm of space. Such things are not common knowledge, especially to desert-dwelling tribals. If they are not aliens to T'nah, as they claim, then how could they possibly know what they do about the cosmos?
Who:
This piece was created for Harsh Realities, my tabletop game company. As odd as it may seem, I do my best to keep The Art of Harsh and Harsh Realities separated. I even do my best to distance myself from the work and try to look at it objectively critically as an art director reviewing a commissioned piece. It's sort of like playing chess against myself, but I manage. lol.
How:
Sometimes I like to really get into the rendering of a pencil piece. This work is one of those pieces. I took the pencil sketch, worked it up some, and then brought it into Photoshop. To avoid start blacks, I played with the line art overlay layer to make it more a dark brown, and painted over some of the darker shadowy areas to bring them up to the proper lighting I had imagined. The rest is just base colors and gradient shading, plus some detail work on top.
