Sunday 29 March 2009

..and never feed your Puck after midnight..

Hi again. It seems my computer is now infected with a dozen or so Pucks, running amok and up to no good. He seemed so harmless at first. Guess I should have paid more attention to that old oriental guy who sold it to me....

Just thought I would show you some of the stuff I have been working on this past week, for the No Dice corebook. I am illustrating a number of black and white images involving our lovable mascot Puck. Since the corebook is a book about roleplaying in general, not a specific setting or world, then each Puck represents a particular genre or archetype, from just about every conceivable type of setting we could imagine. I am about half done on those, but I thought you may like to see some of my favourites so far:








Wednesday 18 March 2009

Judging the book by its cover

Hi again. Over the past few weeks, I have been working on the illustrations of No Dice, a new roleplaying game I have been involved with. Since I have been working flat out on the Illustrations, I thought I would show you what I have done so far....

















This is the Logo design which hopefully captures the essence of the game- essentially, No Dice is about freedom, and uses playing cards rather than the more traditional dice-based games. So I went for the ball and chain metaphor.
Throughout the book, a character called Puck acts as narrator and guide. He is a kind of Jester-type figure, and from the get go, the writer, Leo, had a pretty strong impression of his character and appearance. I began working on 3 different versions of Puck, the first of which , known affectionately as Mini-Puck, is a very cartoon like, stylised figure who appears in various guises and costume throughout the book, in exaggerated and comical poses.

This was my first finished illustration of Mini-Puck, more for my own reference really, so i could easily refer back to this, for proportions and colours. It probably wont actually appear in the final book.

















From that, here`s the first of the Mini-Puck illustrations from the book, each depicting a particular genre. Although coloured, the original book illustrations will be in black and white.


















And from here we move on to a much less stylised, more sophisticated Puck. Since the illustrations in this style will involve more complex storytelling, the character needs to be much less cartoony.


















And finally for the cover illustration. I like to refer to this more realistic version as Uber-Puck. Since people will judge a book by it`s cover, it had to be a little bit special. The biggest difficulty turned out to be the hair, which I really had to learn how it worked.


So anyway, that's how things are progressing, art-wise, at the moment. I will post more to you in the near future....