This is a Tembian, an air-breathing aquatic alien race.

The Tembian spends most of its time floating on the surface, being able to fill the septa of it’s shell structures with air or water, like ballast tanks. It can move on land but only slowly and with great effort.

It filters its food from the water with the flagella structures on the underside. These also provide minor locomotive power. The forward tentacles are arranged so that four “thumbs” surround a single “finger”. Each tentacle can be used with precision against the central finger, but is fairly clumsy when used in conjunction with any other thumb.

There is no internal skeletal structure, though there is a cartilaginous system. The Tembian language is mostly whistles, grunts and clicks, vocalized through the dorsal blowhole (not shown). The Tembian does not have a conventional mouth.

The next in this series should be the Ipp, a symbiotic sapient race that feeds by cleaning the Tembian’s feeding flagella of a barnacle-like parasite. Dan gave me very little art direction on this one, only stressing that he wanted it to be “unusual”.

At the start of the project, I was given a description:

Mordeth are a stout, heavy race. They are shorter than humans, but significantly tougher and stronger. Their bones are thick and their muscles tightly packed. They are covered in leathery, brick red flesh. The Mordeth brain is located inside the chest, and like all the major organs, it is protected by their thick ribs and strong muscles.

A Mordeth’s legs are connected near the top of the blocky torso, with the body suspended from there.  This is somewhat analogous to a human’s legs being attached at the shoulders.  The arms are then floated in sockets connected to the top, outside of the legs.

As a result of their rugged build, it is difficult for most races to compete with the Mordeth in physical combat. However, the same features that make them strong and enduring also leave them clumsy and slow.

Mordeth possess senses similar to humans, but their eyes are located on a nimble stalk which allows them to see in 360 degrees. Their thick skin prevents them from having a well-defined sense of touch, but developed nerves on their feet allow them to feel the vibrations of creatures moving around them.

Like most races, Mordeth have both males and females, however to most races they are utterly indistinguishable. Females will deliver live birth to small litters of Mordeth — usually one to three. The young will immediately be removed from the mother, assessed, and incorporated into the order of society with an assigned rank and task for their life.

Mordeth are omnivorous, but prefer plants to meat. Though they are physically powerful, they are neither swift nor witty enough to hunt most animals native to their homeworld.

Armed with this description, I worked up a page of preliminary sketches. When doing a project like this, I want the anatomy to be as convincing as possible. That means figuring out how masses relate to each other, how bones and muscles (if there are any) are arranged, how such a species would wear clothing, etc. This alien was far more challenging than the Asta (the previous Featured Art piece), since the design was non-humanoid. I needed to create an armature for the unusual leg and arm joints. The torso is suspended from the legs, and the arms are mounted just above and behind.

Here is the sketch page:

After this, we then do a number of back and forth emails, refining the concept. You can see from here that compared to the final work, one of the things that Dan requested was much beefier muscularity. He wanted these things to look like they could casually tear you apart, even though they are shorter than the average human.

Once we worked out the details, I started on the final image. Here was the first proof, basically a work in progress. A lot of details are not yet present.:

The gist of the response to this was that he wanted a redder color. This is pretty simple to do with Photoshop’s Hue and Saturation controls.

The second proof was far closer to finalized:

Dan wanted two specific changes. One: remove the teeth. Not difficult. The second request was a bit more challenging. He felt (rightly) that the eyes looked a bit too much like Googly Eyes. He wanted something more alien. So I did some reading up on the various types of eyes found in  nature, trying for something A) alien, and B) useful. In general simple eyes (like ours) are better than compound eyes, at least in terms of resolution. However, really large compound eyes could approach human acuity. Then I discovered the Mantis Shrimp, which has possibly the most complicated and remarkable eyes in nature. The Mordeth doesn’t need to have exactly the same eyes, since that level of anatomical detail is pretty specialized and beyond the needs of an artistic conceit. But they could echo the design, perhaps possessing a few of the same qualities as mantis shrimp eye. To begin with each eye has three separate imaging systems, giving each one independent trinocular separation. It is theorized that the mantis shrimps eye complexity makes up for it’s miniscule brain power by doing a lot of the image interpretation “up front” as it were. For the Mordeth, this would make sense for a creature whose eyes are so far away from its brain.

Anyway, here is what I came up with:

Once these details were worked out, I presented the final proposed anatomy:

But we weren’t yet finished. This is an ongoing project, which will eventually contain a large number of alien designs. Not all aliens run around without clothes, and clothing is an important cultural artifact. We decided that for humanoid aliens such as the Asta, a detailed surface anatomy wasn’t really necessary. But for a decidedly non-human physiology, we needed both anatomy and clothing. So the final step was to envision how such an organism would clothe itself. This was added as a number of separate layers in Photoshop.

The Mordeth have a view of life similar to the Elizabethan Great Chain of Being, where everyone has a place, from Kings to peasants and down to rocks in the field, and that the universe works best when everyone recognizes and is happiest in their place. As such, I felt it was important that the Mordeth should have cues to other Mordeth as to their station, the equivalent of the different between coveralls and a power suit.

Here is the final illustration. I am omitting the sketch preliminaries here, since there were few if any differences between concept and final:

The patch on the “breast” is something I envisioned as a sort of “Here is who I am” kind of badge. It contains a number of symbols and writing to indicate station. Beyond that, the Mordeth wears a simple undergarment and an ornate tabard (Dan’s idea).

The Mordeth and Epoch of Rysos are © 2009 Dan Repperger, all rights reserved

The subject is an Asta, a member of an alien race from the Epoch of Rysos, ©Daniel Repperger.
I’ve linked to the first video in the series (there are 12, plus a conclusion). The whole series can be found here.

into this:

There really isn’t much more to the Photoshop file than the black and white image you see in the first shot. Each design element is on a separate layer. Each layer has a series of effects that control things like beveling, shiny-ness, color and gradient, texture, drop shadows and so forth. Once the base design is achieved, the majority of time is spent in tweaking all of these individual layers and their effects to achieve just the look you want. This same design could have been made to look as if chiseled on stone or carved from polished gemstones without touching the base art, but only manipulating the layer effects.

My first three sketches were as follows:

Sketch 1) I didn’t like MMA on the same line as “Warhammer” since it made the letters too skinny. Since the design would otherwise have a less than powerful “L” shape, I added them as a banner off to the right. Wasn’t entirely happy with it.

Sketch 2) Better lettering. Now it looks like that hammer is having to do some work.

Sketch 3) Here is where inspiration strikes. By writing out the full title, I can put them on an arc. This does several things. It clears up the ambiguity of the acronym, MMA. The arc gives the feel of the hammer swing in motion, giving a dynamism the former designs lacked. Finally, it pulls the design elements together into a unified whole, framing the main character and pulling the action from the face down to the body of the logo type.

I sent all three to the customer, however. Sometimes it helps to stack your odds of doing a design you really like, by including some of your early rejections. This can backfire if the client winds up liking a design you really have no confidence in, or affinity to.

This did in fact happen to a degree after the first round of proofs. The cusomer liked the design from Sketch 3, but preferred the spidery “weak” lettering from Sketch 1. His biggest complain however, was regarding the horns on the helmet. He was not a fan of the traditional fantasy Viking-esque helmet (as an aside, real Vikings did not wear horns, in defiance of Hollywood’s insistence), and asked for horns that pointed more downward. I gave him sketches 4 and 5. I really thought that the thinner lettering was wrong for the design, but you can’t really push something the client doesn’t like. So I gave him the new horn design, and offered to show it to him with the:

Sketch 4) Skinny lettering

Sketch 4) and the blocky lettering

Bingo. The client was now on board with the heavy lettering, but the comment that came back on the horns was “A little longer horns and it will be perfect.”. The art director at Empty Room Studios (my go-between on this), suggested, “I would go with something large and intimidating, Keith. Perhaps something ridged like a ram’s horn but curving down like you have them. I’m thinking something more “video gamish” instead of your traditional fantasy. Does that make sense?”

This gave us Sketch 6) The horns are longer, but still not enough.

The response was, “The client is still not sure about the horns. Can we try ram horns?”  This time, I took no chances. Instead of pulling horns out of the ether of my imagination, I did an image search on ram horns, looking through many pictures of Bighorn Sheep until I really stared to get a feel for them and what was possible.

Sketch 7) This was the hit. It got the thumbs up to move forward.

I will reserve the technical details of creating a digital painting for a different post, since this one is more about the evolutionary process of creating a design to match the client’s needs. Instead, I will skip to the rendered piece.

Final Painting 1) This has all sorts of textures applied to the lettering and to the arch. The big beefy barbarian at once looks powerful yet kind of goofy. This makes him engaging as a symbol while still retaining that “badass” quality the client specified.

The client liked the piece in principle, but still wasn’t quite happy with it. The comment that came back was, “He likes everything, but wants it darker. . . more evil I suppose. He mentioned the movie Pathfinder and the Deathdealer paintings. I think he wants something more “gritty”. He mentioned dark colors like grey, black, brown, and red as his favorites.”

For those not into fantasy art, The Death Dealer is a classic painting by the grandmaster of fantasy illustration, Mr. Frank Frazetta. Pathfinder is a pastiche of this painting by Michael Muller for the eponymous film.

If this were pre-digital, I would be up a creek. I’d need to re-do the entire painting. And it would be my fault for not going through the steps of color roughs first. One of my bad habits is that I don’t like to work on a piece in dribs and drabs. Once I am in the mood, I want to go! This is a bad instinct for a graphic artist.

Fortunately, changing the color cast of a piece is not that drastic for modern technology. The painting was on many layers and had some complex effects, so it wasn’t a matter of “pushing the darker and grittier button”, but it wasn’t a terrible task to re-work the color. It also gave me the impetus to change a few things I wasn’t entirely happy with, such as the teeth.

Here is the final piece as the client accepted it:

For those curious about the client, it appears that they now manufacture and sell martial arts apparel.

This is an example of a common difficulty in historical fantasy game maps. There is a constant battle between accuracy and artistic authenticity. On the one hand, the customer wants a map that will look as much as possible like a map of teh time. They want a product which the player or gamemaster can hold and get that visceral feel of connection with the setting.

CLICK FOR MAP

In this case, Solomon Kane lived in the 16th century. The world was far from fully mapped. At the same time, much of the action is in the discovery and exploration of far-off lands, or strange hidden lands within places once mysterious and unknown, such as Deepest Africa. You will note that Australia is hinted at on this map, though it was not discovered by Europeans until the following centruy.

This is a nod to Accuracy and Utility. Though we want a map that looks like something Kane himself might have held, the players and gamemaster want something that they can use to accurately gauge distances, or spacial relationships between land-masses. They want the arcane and the familiar in one product. In general, these aims are incompatible, and the problem gets worse as you “zoom in” to larger scale maps. In a future post, I will show a portion of a map of the Eastern seaboard of North America that also illustrates this point.

The concession was arrived at in this map, that landmasses that had been discovered would be shown faithfully, even if they were not already fully mapped. The farthest north, the farthest south, and places like Australia would be faded and ghostly.

The rendering of the map was done as follows. I started with an outline map of the world, used with the permission of the Cartographic Research Laboratory of the University of Alabama. I converted this to Photoshop format and laid down some base colors, using the climate zones of the real world as a guide. It doesn’t look like much at this stage. The detail comes next.

In step three, I lay down the major surface textures of the world. At this scale, this is primarily mountains, hills and vegetation. These are each done on separate layers in the Photoshop document. By putting them on different layers, I can quickly and easily make changes, should I make a mistake. I don’t have to worry about destroying my forest work with a misplaced mountain range, for example. (For those unfamiliar with layers in an illustration program, imagine them as layers of clear paper. Each piece of paper is layered one over the other and each layer can contain different artwork. The final piece for this project had 13 layers, not including the type.)

You will also note that the surface detail I have painted does not look particularly naturalistic. The forms do not flow into each other convincingly. Once I have finished the rendering of the map, none of this artificiality will be visible. Especially since the printed product was destined for a standard 8.5″ x 11″ page. At this scale, minor details become obscured. The impression is the important thing. (You may remember that lesson from my last featured map.)

Now that the details are in, it’s time to make it all look pretty. I created a virtual piece of parchment (4 layers: for dirt, texture, color, and edge effects) and composited the map with the parchment, using Photoshop’s transparency tools to make the image look as if it was painted on the parchment. It’s all still editable. All of the preceding images were taken from the finished work, just by isolating the layers. Here is what it looks like when assembled.

The final step is to put in all the type. (This image shows a detail area, with type in place and a close up of the parchment texture.) Photoshop is a great program, but it really isn’t designed to handle a lot of individual pieces of type. It wants to put each label on a separate layer. Thats’ really unmanageable and a nightmare to edit. So a link to the graphic is placed in a different program altogether: Adobe Illustrator. The Illustration workhorse has so many features that it really deserves a post of it’s own. Suffice it is an essential compliment to Photoshop. Here all of the labels are affixed to the map, the gridlines are superimposed, and that critical “KAC” signature is placed at the bottom.

A final advantage of using layers. This map had two final copies: one usable by the players, and one usable by the Gamemaster, who needs to know the location of mythical places Kane visited, of which the characters would be unaware. By placing the Gamemaster’s labels on a separate layer, I could generate a player copy and a GM copy with little trouble. This savings is of course passed on to the customer, and the second map was practically a freebie. (It might even have been thrown in gratis; it’s been a while since I did this.)

Once the customer approves, a final, printable copy with no layers is generated. (This is like I took all those pieces of transparent paper and fused them all into one image.) Why don’t I give the layered copy to the customer? Well, sometimes I do on request. But there is so much that can go wrong with a layered image. What if the printer doesn’t have the right font, for instance? Or what if the customer makes an experiment with the layers and winds up producing something unprintable? I use a lot of little tricks to make things work right, and they are not all immediately obvious. It’s also just a lot smaller and easier to transport and print.

Finally, once again, the finished image.

Rezolution City Map - Click for full image.

This map was created for Aberrant Games, for their Rezolution line. It was an emergency job, as the contracted artist had let them down in some manner. They needed a city sector map for a post apocalyptic, cyberpunk style world. I was given an existing piece and asked to copy the style. I don’t have re-posting rights for the sample, but I am allowed to feature the resulting map I created.

This is an example of a collaboration of Illustrator and Photoshop elements. 90% of the detail is provided by Illustrator. Most of this detail is implied. The aim was to create something that looked like a satellite image. To this end, there is no perspective to speak of, just a straight top-down view.

The buildings are actually simple shapes, with hairline outlines. The shapes all have a tiny drop shadow effect applied to them to give them the illusion of sitting on a surface. Illustrator allows you to apply a Style to an object, much like you would define and apply a style to text in a word processor. So I was started with objects based on this style. If they looked less than convincing, I could redefine the style and all the buildings would update to match. This made edits very quick and uniform. I always try to plan a project for efficiency. (You might notice a lot of repeated shapes.)

The resulting image however did not look convincing. It needed the sort of detail that makes a satellite image look real. As I sated earlier, this was a rush project, so I couldn’t really take the time to add the necessary fiddly bits to lend authenticity. Nowadays, I have several techniques using defined image patterns, but I hadn’t hit on that idea yet. Besides, part of the assignment specs required that some of the buildings be distinct and well-defined. Too much detail would tend to get them lost and make their unclear. To that end I decided to keep the buildings fairly smooth, and make the background chaotic and detailed instead.

I took some real satellite images from various sources and mixed and matched. There are real-world cities, as well as some badlands topology. I reduced them to a grayscale of similar value to the building pieces and used that as a backdrop for the whole project.

Finally, the project required the whole illustration to look like a computer display. I created a frame with a 3-D effect and devised a lettering style. Once again, in the interests of efficiency, the labels are styles. All I had to do was type the name and the round-cornered rectangular background creates itself. If I didn’t like the results (and I didn’t, for the first several attempts), I redefined the style and all the labels updated.

I liked the finished piece. It gives the illusion of exquisite thoroughness with very little actual technical detail.

This map is copyright Aberrant Games. Reproduced with permission.

For more maps and commissioned art, go to www.KACurtis.com

The original map was fairly simple, and designed to look like an artifcat produced within the campaign. In other words, it looked like something a character might possess, rather than a campaign document. The exception is that neighborhoods are labeled by broad categories, rather than what people would actually name them. This reflects the state of planning at that point. That level of detail simply didn’t exist.

Early Map of Tallon

Eventually, as the years of real time accumulated, details began to create themselves organically. The characters wanted to go to a different tavern, or wanted to buy a horse, or wanted a place to get cleaned up after a journey. Every business they went to or NPC they spoke to was given a location and maybe a quick notation. The city map began to grow. This became fun to do, and I would begin to add places they might be likely to go, or city infrastructure that might have a bearing on the action of an adventure (where are the guard houses, for example).

The map grew and grew. Eventually it became too detailed to display as a small graphic, so I tiled it and inserted hot links to all the write ups. What had been a prop now became a tool. As I grew more proficient with my graphics software (or as new capabilities were added), I tried to make the map as graphically pleasing as possible. The result is mark 2 (actually, tehre were several evolutionary steps, but they have been lost, or were never completed). Here is a tile from the on-line map as it currently stands:

City of Tallon Second Map

The rate at which new places and NPCs are being added has slowed down considerably, since the game has shifted to play-by-post, and the action has been primarily overland, but I keep returning to the map. It is now a pastime, an artwork as much as a campaign tool. The latest version (which is a long term work in progress is shown in excerpt below. Buildings are now rendered in detail, using graphic tools to simulate roof-lines and building shadows. Larger buildings are simply drawn in a more realistic format, although still essentiall graphic in nature, to keep the project manageable. Eventually, when this is finished, I will either simply replace the current map on-line, tile for tile, or possibly use a Google Maps interface, allowing players to zoom and click to their hearts’ content.

Work in Progress at comparable zoom

City of Tallon Work in Progress Detail

Now I have no illusions about this. It’s a project for fun. I’ll never detail every building, nor would I want to. No one is going to read the whole thing. But it’s just pleasant to create and creates a great sense of immersion.