Concept art, Science Fiction, Sketchbook pages

Colony 87 Report

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Colony 87 hover rickshaw and dino-beast
Colony 87 hover rickshaw

It’s been ages since I put anything online (I recently moved house which is very stressful). I’m working as a freelance concept artist for Crooked Dice Games and much of what I’ve created whilst in the game development phase is secret. However the beast in this illustration has been released as a miniature (sculpted by the talented Andrew May).

Colony 87 range – Pack Animal

Colony 87 jet bikes and beast riders

This creature (called a Sand Treader in the Colony 87 game) evolved from a sketch on these sketchbook pages from 2020 I drew for the Colony 87 project. (We’ve also got some Pale alien race ideas, my two bounty hunters on their jetbikes, a nomad on his domesticated giant bird, a Colony Police person on a jetbike, a wasteland scrap merchant on her dinosauroid, a raider type on his camel-lizard, some portraits of raiders, the hover-rickshaw and the beast that Karl at Crooked Dice liked, at the base some more colony cops on their bikes!)

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Life study

More life drawings.

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Life drawing in pastels on pastel paper,

No posts for the last few months as I’ve had to move town (from Huntingdon up to Newark-on-Trent) so I’ve had to leave my life drawing group of the last 25-ish years.

Farewell ‘Pencil Squeezers’ which eventually became part of The Buckden Life Drawing Group when Huntingdonshire Regional College got run down and sold off. I’ll miss the artistic discipline (an hour and three quarters of concentration – trying to capture what a living person looks like), followed by some lively chat down the pub with all my friends from the group. Many thanks to all the models over the years too.

To celebrate this time I’ve added some more recent drawings to this website, (not the most recent, I’ve yet to photograph them, I’ll tell you when that’s done). You can see them by clicking on ‘Figure Studies’ on the top.

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Concept art, Sketchbook pages

More Panzerfäuste Mountain Trolls!

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Mountain Troll Commander

Here’s some more colour sketches of Panzerfäuste Mountain Trolls. We have a Commander with a badge of a Iku-Turso or Tursas on his wool hat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iku-Turso_(creature)

Mountain Troll Lotta Svärd and Shaman

Next we have a Lotta Svärd (Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotta_Sv%C3%A4rd) and a Shaman with his ceremonial drum with a Troll rune pattern.

Mountrain Troll (Vuoritroll) Command

And here is the final miniatures concept page. The Lotta Svärd’s sword is loosely based on a famous Finnish iron age sword belonging to a noble woman. I invented all the runes at the top too! I really enjoyed drawing these three, I’d hoped to see them in 3D form some time but that wasn’t to be.

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Fantasy, Sketchbook pages

Panzerfäuste Mountain Troll Anti-tank Team

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Here are some more sketches of unsculpted Panzerfäuste Miniatures – These were Vuoritroll (based on the Finnish fighters of WWII) anti tank-team with their traditional weapons for taking out armour – logs and fuel drum molotov cocktails.

Various historo-fantasy games including Panzerfäuste can be found here:

https://orcsinthewebbe.co.uk/

And Steve Blease, Panzerfäuste mastermind, owner of Wessex Games can be found here:

http://www.wessexgames.co.uk/

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Comic art

Happy New Year!

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Fantasy Christmas Comic page 8
Fantasy Christmas Comic page 8

Happy New Year everyone who takes a look at this website! There has not been any activity here for ages, that doesn’t mean I’ve not been working. A lot of my creation is concept art for Crooked Dice Games’ Colony 87 game which is still in its early days.

Though I did finish the next page of my Fantasy Christmas Comic. Here, the adventurers who acquired miss-sold magic items have followed the creator of these objects; a Liche Zann-Tarr the Undying, to his mountain lair in the far North. They defeated his Moon Troll and his undead minions and are chasing him as he flees.

This was created from a physical pencil layout, scanned in and inked, coloured and lettered in Clip Studio.

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Science Fiction, Sketchbook pages

To Colony 87 and beyond!

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I’m still working on Colony 87 but much of it is top secret. Occasionally I find a sketch or concept drawing that has been sculpted (this time by the talented sculptor Andrew May) and released.

This page contains four new characters; a woman who repairs robots, often cobbling them together to sell, the itinerant lawyer helping the poor, a sinister alien artefact trader and a lone, aged colonist unable to walk but who drives around the market on his custom kart.

Colony 87 Market characters

You can purchase them here:

Colony 87 range – Bot Trader

Colony 87 range – Sci-fi Market Folk

Colony 87 range – Artefact Trader

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Concept art

Sump Spider Hunters artwork

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Here are the finished images that I sent to Mad Robot Miniatures. The first is the Sumpship Captain.

Yaktribe – Sumpship Captain

The next are two harpooneers with their appropriate alternative heads (and weapons) to make a crew of four.

Sump-sea Harpooneers
Sump-sea Harpooneers 2

Here’s the link to Mad Robot Miniatures:

https://madrobotminiatures.com/

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Science Fiction, Sketchbook pages

Here’s some artwork!

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Hello everyone, I know this blog has had no new posts since last May but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on art and illustration! Apart from my main commission from Crooked Dice Games (Colony 87) I’ve been learning the 3D program Blender which I’ll show you some examples of later.

Before that we’ll go way back to late 2020 when I was commissioned by Mad Robot Miniatures to create a special character miniature for the Necromunda Yaktribe meet up, I don’t know whether it happened or not due to COVID restrictions.

My brief from the Yaktribe community described a sump spider hunter on a ship who was a reimagining of Captain Ahab.
As it happened BBC Sounds had an audio adaptation of Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick so I listened to that, as I’d never read it before and I made some sketches and notes.

sketchbook pages showing the development of the Sump Ship Captain and his crew
Sumpship Captain and crew ideas

Here are my initial sketches of him and some ideas for his crew. I liked the metal eye-patch that Chang (played by Chritopher Plummer) had in Star Trek VI so that was a starting point for his head. He would need a harpoon that could break through the tough exoskeleton of a sump-spider so I designed ones with various drills/grabbers/flamethrowers. I spent some time figuring how these would work.

Sketchbook Mar2018 Sumpship crew ideas

Here’s the link to Star Trek VI on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_VI:_The_Undiscovered_Country

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Concept art, Science Fiction

Colony 87 Prospects

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More of my images from the Colony 87 setting, this guy is a prospector with his survey drone.

This chap evolved from a sketch of a sauroid beast of burden with prospecting gear so I had to give the beast an owner. He has all the equipment a prospector would need in the wastelands: A new survey drone, core samples, geo-sampler and respirator. The drone re-charges on his arm, I imagined it would operate like a tame hawk in desert, though this would seek and analyse the area whilst broadcasting the information back to the prospector.

He has a power pick and trowel when he needs to get his hands dirty. I drew him to look a bit like all-round acting legend James Hong (Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Bladerunner (1982) amongst many others). His padded coat resembles the rock strata of his profession and he has a corporate logo on his backpack.

You can purchase a miniature of him here if you like:

Crooked Dice – Games Colony 87 range – Freelancers

And his drone is amongst these:

Crooked Dice – Games Colony 87 range – Sci fi loot objectives

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Fan Art, Illustrations, Science Fiction

House Delaque Ganger

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Well I haven’t updated this site for months, so here’s an image I created as part of a job application for a Games Workshop Specialist Games Digital Illustrator a couple of years ago. I didn’t get the job.

He’s a sinister Delaque ganger, from the House of Shadows, I read a bit about them online to better get a sense of their new iteration (even more sneaky and slightly psychic). As Delaques have snakes and a stiletto dagger as their logo I thought a sickly turquoise colour for his gear would be appropriate to suggest poisoned flesh.

I’ve modified the miniatures logo (based on Jes Goodwin’s original sketch from the 1995 boxed game) to a stylised snake skull. I gave him a slash tattoo to signify his preferred method of fighting and made sure his bionic eyes looked like the operation to remove them was quite brutal.

Here’s the sketchbook page where I pencilled him first:

I enjoyed creating him; I started with a pencil drawing then digitally painted over that in Photoshop with a bit of Painter to finish off, as I have more experience in using Painter.

This is all Copyright Games Workshop.

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SF & Fantasy Art