Dretch

Among the demonic hordes of the Infinite Layers of the Abyss, the Dretch is undoubtedly the most pitiful. Small, stinking, blubbery midgets, they are only barely intelligent enough to comprehend speech and cannot approximate it themselves - instead relying on a crude form of telepathy. Which is not to deny that Dretches are cruel, monstrous creatures who seek out murder and destruction for the sheer joy of it; merely that where there is a Dretch, there is also most likely a more powerful demon somewhere behind, goading it into action.

I finally bought a cintiq last week! This makes two entries so far made using a cintiq on this blog - this one and the Rogue Eidolon (which I made at a place where I was working last year). They both have a kind of painterly look, which is something the cintiq helps with. This guy was fun to draw, especially the graphic, simian face. I tried to get a balance between him looking scary/silly, it's a balance I like to straddle. What do you think?

- Joe

Gray Dwarves (Duergar)

Like the drow, the duergar are a cold-hearted subterranean race of dark-skinned humanoids. Unlike the drow, they put on no airs of aristocratic refinement, despite thinking they're better than anybody else.

Duergar are deep believers that life is nothing but thankless, painful work, as the doctrines Laduguer state. The priests of their religion go through agonizing torture in order to prove themselves worthy. The rest of them are all craftsmen, creating beautiful treasure after treasure. However, they don't seem to indulge very much in them. The dress of the duergar is drab, without embellishment, while their works are locked away in deep trap-filled vaults. Life is work, not pleasure, even if it's the pleasure of artistic accomplishment.

Duergar also have a fascinating origin myth. Laduguer created the grey dwarves and taught them to work. And they did. But there was one dwarf, the Lone Craftsman, who would hide away from deific eyes and commit blasphemies: he created life. The Lone Craftsman made all the other races of the world and when Laduguer found out, he cursed him, transforming him into the first derro, another subterranan race made up of psychotic small man incapable of creation due to their small attention spans. So the Duergar see all other races as abominations and insults against their god. They especially hate other dwarves, seeing them as the Lone Craftsman's ultimate heresy. The only race they almost respect are gnomes, since they're almost as single-minded in their craftsmanship as the duergar.

They're tough to fight as well, with innate size-changing and invisibility abilities. I bet a good many adventurer has been smashed by an underground giant not realizing that they were fighting a dwarf.

There need to be more lady dwarves. Also, the lady dwarves need to be as hirsute as their male counterparts.

Petal

Petals are tiny fey creatures who can sometimes prove problematic to adventurers (but rarely intentionally). They inhabit secluded areas in temperate forests, and their chief reaction to travelers of any sort is to sing to them. This would, it has to be said, be less of a problem if the magical voices of Petals didn't put the listener into a drowsy, peaceful sleep.

While this might seem at first mischievous, they consider it in fact an act of utter benevolence - is there any creature alive who doesn't deserve a little more rest in life? Afterwards, they tend to their slumbering "victims" by removing their amour (it can't be comfy to rest in all those silly metal plates!) and weaving them soft garments of leaves, which the hapless adventurers wake up in.

The description of the Petal is so sweet I can't hardly stand it. I struggle a lot with the details on these lately - I want to add lines to define things like the mouth, fingers, but it's hard to make them not jar against the airbrushy shading. I'm pleased with the colours, though.

- Joe

Slok, Frogwarden

Slok is a PC I created for a comedic-themed campaign some friends of ours are running and is a masterpiece of planning because, despite being a bit of a joke, he covertly manages to be a) sort of a cool idea (for me, anyway) as well as b) possibly overpowered (pending on my reading up on a couple of rules).

He's the first druid I've ever rolled - for some reason I've never been much attracted to the class - and also my first half-orc. Druids are popularly considered overpowered through sheer versatility - their Wild Shape class ability allows them to transform into a host of different creatures which can be useful in many situations.

Slok's gimmick is that I'm using the Pack Lord archetype (actually for the Pathfinder series of games, which we've taken to playing lately) with him, which means rather than just choosing one animal companion (as is the druid's usual allocation) Slok gets to instead have a selection of lower-levelled animal companions (divided up between his druid levels, so at level 4 he can have 4 lvl 1 companions, 2 lvl 2 companions etc). I've accordingly given him four giant frogs as companions (he also has to forgo a domain). Archetypes are fun! You should check out pathfinder if you don't already know it.

The art was fun. Wanted to get it done quicker so went for a more flat, graphic style.

Asherati

The Asherati are a race of elfish creatures who live in societies beneath the sands of great deserts. Standing around the height of the average human they nevertheless appear strangely lithe in their gait, wearing fluid, skin-hugging outfits of tanned leather. Their minimal taste in armour is a result of their primary method of travel - they are capable of swimming easily through sand, or other very loose soil, to get from place to place.

I went for a sort of earth-themed-Zora look for this guy, as you can probably see by the nose and the eyes. Did you ever play Majora's Mask? The Zora swimming sections in that are incredibly fun, they got a great feel for the momentum of it. Maybe it's an unconscious coincidence but the chunky golden swords remind me of the big weapons Ganon has in OoT.

This one's a back-and-forth mix of Photoshop and Paint Tool Sai.

- Joe

Jammy Dodger and the Marmelooze

Sorry about the lack of updates. See the previous post for our excuses.

Also sorry about cheating, because this is my new character, rather than a creature. I just finished DMing Paizo's Path of Immortality set of adventures, which ended up with everyone dying (except for one who went mad with power and another person who got trapped in the Astral Plane). Some of the players enjoyed it to the point of wanting to DM there own campaign, which they said would be silly.

Well.

So my new character is Jammy Dodger, gnome alchemist/summoner. The Marmelooze is what happens when you make preserves from magical oranges. It would seem I like playing gnomes that probably shouldn't be adventuring.

Dis gonn be good though.

Dungeons & Drawings Update!

Hey! We haven't been uploading stuff very often for a while now, so I just wanted to make a quick post giving some kind of context for the change in pace, as well as revealing some future plans for the blog.

Blanca and I both do most of our paid work as freelance animators. Dungeons & Drawings has so far remained a pretty much non-profit creative vehicle for us - our circulation at the moment is pretty good but we ain't no Game Grumps, and we don't run ads, but we're pretty lucky in that our main method of making money still generally revolves around drawing pictures.

Being freelance just means we do work on an as-and-when basis, so a studio will hire us for X amount of days. This means that work comes along in bursts, and sometimes it can be pretty intense! For about the last month or two we've been on and off on a couple of pretty crazy jobs, including a music video that we should be able to post soon - and unfortunately our D&D output has suffered. We both feel kinda bad, but it's just a result of the ebbs and flows of being a gun-for-hire in the art world.

Anyway, enough excuses! Today, we're back on track with a couple of illustrations flyin' at ya straight outta Streatham. But also we're happy to announce a couple of Dungeons & Drawings convention appearances in the UK - firstly

COMIKET at Central St. Martins on Saturday 20th of April

Comiket is a Small Press expo that happens twice every year and features a bunch of amazing artists that make really amazing art and comics.

LONDON MCM EXPO at the Excel Centre on 25th- 26th of May

London MCM is the Big Cheese of British comic conventions. It fills out one whole side of the gigantic Excel Centre and is typically a massive, colourful, hot, sweaty nerdfest that lasts for two and a half days. We'll be there in the Comic Village on Saturday and Sunday! Come by and check us out! Supposedly Shinichiro Watanabe (of Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo fame) will be there?!?! Woah!

We'll be selling a selection of postcard prints and stickers at both of these. If you live in England come along, we'd love to meet you! Also Joe will be plugging his new comic, too.

Anyway, back to our regular scheduling. Thanks for sticking with us!

- Blanca & Joe

Carcass Eater

The Carcass Eater is a small animal a rat and a hound. As an animal whose main diet is comprised of carrion, its common haunts are graveyards, battlegrounds, abbatoirs and any other sort of place that would be home to heaps of rotting flesh. The Carcass Eater has a sharp sense of smell and can detect the smallest drop of blood, the scent of which drives it into a shark-like feeding frenzy. Its jaws are especially big, useful for tearing hunks of meat and breaking bones.

This was a blind image, given to me by Joe. I was kinda panicky when he gave it to me when I saw that it was an animal type creature. Animals tend to be, well, actual real creatures that either exist or have existed in the past; creatures of little intelligence and no magical ability. Sometimes there's bigger than usual. I was worried that he'd given me an actual animal and was worried that I was going to represent a real creature in a way that didn't represent it in reality. Which may have been interesting, now that I think about it, like how giraffes were drawn when the description was "camel-like creature with leopard spots".

Semnurv

Semnurvs are intelligent magical beasts who fiercely serve as champions for goodness and law. They have the appearance of a large dog with enormous, colourful wings in place of forepaws, using them to swoop down on enemies from great heights.

Semnurvs (or Simurghs), far from their rather... furaffinity.net interpretation in D&D, are actually a genuine mythical creature from iranian folklore, which makes sense as they fit into the whole "winged mammals" thing that you get quite a lot in the middle east (sphinxes, lamassus etc). Persian myth, as with every other moderately obscure folkloric tradition, has some pretty interesting nuggets in there if you're prepared to look!

Fairly quick one this week, as I still have another to catch up on to bring me up to date. I used a combination of Paint Tool Sai and Photoshop. The first time I used a tablet to draw was using the old Painter Classic when I was a kid, and Sai's a similar sort of thing. Even though paint programs like that are obviously never going to be quite as charming as the real life painting they're trying to emulate, the physical feel of the colour is still really fun. It's nice how colour mixes and drags in ways that you don't get in photoshop. I want to be able to do more sophisticated painting in the program but I started off with something pretty basic and graphic.

We were busy at last weekend's Birmingham MCM Expo and we're gearing up to exhibit at the main London MCM this May! Dungeons & Drawings are working on some big things right now, so if you're in London or even in England at all, do consider dropping by, we'd love to say hi.

- Joe

PS his head is modeled off a Borzoi, which I think is a particularly awesome-looking breed of dog.

Zeuglodon

A Zeuglodon is a giant marine creature with a great crocodile-like maw and long-flexible body. Despite its vaguely reptilian shape, the Zeuglodon is a real-life ancestor of the whale. Like many whales, these fellas can be found primarily in cold waters. Despite their impressive teeth, the tail of the Zeuglodon is especially dangerous, being used to stun prey and break apart ships.

You know what I find tolerable? Model-building. You know what I find incredibly frustrating? Photography. The raft of the model was especially fun to make, which  is made from various sticks from around where I live. I decided to do this to challenge myself with some different materials, and was a good deal inspired by the model-work of my friend Grethe Bentsen.

Porcupine Cactus

Standing in its ripened state no higher than a halfling, the Porcupine Cactus is so called for its bizarre method of seed dispersion. Rather than relying on its fruit to be digested, rainwater instead causes it to swell to an enormous size, whereupon any disturbance of the plant will result in its body rupturing, sowing the thornlike seeds in all directions. The Porcupine Cactus' detonation also serves a more greusome purpose - should the source of the disturbance be another creature, the volley of thorns may kill it, providing a fresh source of nutrients for the next generation.

This is another "blind" pick - Blanca chose the creature, then gave me nothing more than the text description, with the name blacked out. It's fun! I think I'd have probably gone for something more deliberately cactus-like if I'd known, which might have been a bit predictable. Its face - well, the eye, anyway - is part artistic flourish (ie I just like the way it looks) and part a response to the fact that the plant apparently possesses Low-light Vision. I know this is probably more a representation of the plant's ability to "sense" things around it but I just liked the idea that it would have a big eyeball. WELP

My posts have been pretty few and far between lately. I'm fairly busy! I promise I'll get back into the swing of things, though.

ALSO you can drop by the MCM Anime Expo in Birmingham next week and see Blanca and I! I'll be hawking my lame comics, too. Look for us in the Comic Village!

- Joe

Skirr

Skirr are massive undead flying creatures. The appear as vaguely humanoid avian creatures with long-toothed bull heads, often covered in funeral wrappings, like a mummy would. The question is what are these creatures? Who mummified them? Why would they do that? Are they an ancient intelligent race? Demons? Corporeal gods? A physical manifestation of evil?

Whatever they were, the evidence is long gone. Now they're animal-like monsters, crawling from their ancient tombs and flying in vast empty places where someone might be stranded. They swoop down on their unfortunate victim and snatch them up in their talons. They fly up as high as they can then let the victim drop...

Joe picked this monster for me to draw this week. It might be something we do to challenge the other person to step out of their comfort zone. Normally I don't go for skeletons. I can draw skulls okay, but the complicated-ness of the rest of the bone structure muddles my head up some. But I'm quite happy with the way the bones in this look, especially the rib cage, especially considering the extra weird-shaped bones that birds have.