A Life In The Dungeons (with dragons)

If there’s something that’s been with me much of my life, it’d have to be Dungeons and Dragons. Some buddies introduced me to roleplaying games at 13 (Marvel Super Heroes Deluxe Edition… FASERIP!) but they quickly grew bored with it and moved us into into Dungeons And Dragons… Advanced-style. I didn’t stay a player for long… I quickly gravitated to the Dungeon Master role and took over the story crafting (which would presage my interest in screenwriting about a decade later).

As I had been drawing for years, it didn’t take me long to incorporate the two interests, where I’d actually start doing drawings of the characters my players were playing, some nonplayer characters I’d introduced in the campaign, and some key characters from published works like Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance.

Who doesn’t love drawing dragons. Now, I have to be honest here. The one on the left was totally ripped off from artist Jeff Easley’s 2nd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. And the framing effect of both sets was totally ripped off from Drew Struzan’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade poster. Sixteen year old me was pretty shameless about swiping from his influences. Funny thing… half a decade later in college, when an art teacher asked me who my favourite painter was, and I named Jeff Easley, they were less than impressed. I’m sure the proper answer as DaVinci or some other “proper” Ninja Turtle artist, but, no… I was taken with the modern pop culture stylings supplied by TSR’s Dungeons and Dragons books.

These next ones were taken from my D&D campaign with my brother and our friends. One of my fondest memories was when we played an adventure and started at sundown and didn’t finish till sunrise. We always talked about wanting to do another “allnighter”, but it never had the same magic as that spontaneous one. Isn’t that a life lesson?

Why are the arms so short and the hands so small? I dunno. Why are there no feet? If I recall, it started with the dwarf… my brother’s character. I drew him too low on the page, but there was such attitude in his expression I didn’t want to draw him again and try and capture it. I’ve never enjoyed re-drawing things over and over again. So, being a big fan of consistency, I continued the rest of the characters with the same missing feet.

Some of these were NPCs (nonplayer characters to gaming folks) or just random made up adventurers that I may have planned to introduce to the campaign. It may also just be that drawing girls was fun. My superhero influences are pretty apparent here. Then I started drawing characters from Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance.

Now, this one… Raistlin fighting dragons in The Abyss from the Dragonlance Legends books. The one on the left was done back on the day, and the one on the right was my colourization of it when I got my Wacom Cintiq tablet. I made some changes to the layout to bring that third dragon into the conflict… in the old illustration, he was just kind of “hey, I’m here too”.

I wasn’t drawing much for fun in college, though I did get the chance to indulge in some fantasy art somewhere in that time period. I don’t remember the assignment, specifically… probably something to do with colour contrasts… hence the strong blue and orange going on.

Fast forward many years. I got involved with the website “Talentville”, for screenwriters. Ben Cahan had asked me about doing some artwork, and I got it in my head to do some concept art to demonstrate something. So I created a concept…. “Cowboys and Dragons”. Haha. This wasn’t long after Cowboys and Aliens, so it wasn’t a big stretch. At this time it was more about using broad strokes to tell a visual story, which explains the roughness of the whole thing.

Around this time I created the big mass of bowling ball themes for Big Brothers Big Sisters “Bowl For Kids Sake” fundraiser. Among these were a series of dragon themed artworks… not traditional dragons, mind you… anthropomorphic dragons. But the textures were really fun to capture… the heat and soot for the red dragon, and all that icy cold for the blue dragon.

Half a decade later I discovered the website Society6, and I decided to use my skills and spare time to create potentially saleable artworks as merch. So, back to dragons! This one was all about capturing light and shade, heat, real feeling textures. Layer upon layer interacting with each other to create hot, unearthly glows. The file itself ended up huge. But, it was fun….

I took a detour from actual dragons to create more D&D-adjacent artworks playing with the concept of the game, though not necessarily featuring dragons. Some were just random ideas (“Let’s Go On An Adventure”, “Make Your Own Luck”), some were twists on pop culture icons (“Keep Calm and Roll On”, “What Goes Down In The Dungeon…”) and some were plays on motivational posters (“Perseverance…”, “Teamwork”, “What Doesn’t Kill You…”).

Which brings me back to dragons again. Another run at the Merch wheel. This one utilized heavily Photoshopping (sorry, Adobe) real textures and shapes to craft them into dragon heads. Loads of fun. Sold a few of this one too. And at least one of them to… uh… me.