Nathzarune Rakshasa

 While the standard rakshasa is a pretty formidable spellcaster, the Nazathurne rakshasa is a whole different story. It has no spells of its own, but isn't completely devoid of magical ability. Instead, this rakshasa can meld with the shadows and travel through them. Its lack of arcane knowledge is replaced with physical knowledge, which it uses to inflict devastating damage.

D&D has a few different rakshasas. The standard ones are pretty cool and Anthony S. Water's illustration for the 3.5 rakshasa is probably my favourite illustration in the Monster Manual, if not all of D&D illustrations. Other books added further rakshasas with more specific themes. Instead of being a sorcerer like the standard, the nazathurne is a rogue/shadowdancer.

The rakshasas are a set of demons from Indian mythology. Actually, they're more the Indian equivalent to the Japanese oni than European demons. Since both Hindu and Buddhism believe in reincarnation, sometimes rakshasa are the transformed or reincarnated form of a wicked person. The whole tiger-headed thing, though present is South Asian art, is exaggerated a bit by D&D. In mythology, a rakshasa can have the head of different animals or deformed features. Especially strong ones have multiple heads and limbs.

Book suggestionn du jour is The Ultimate Ilustrated Guide to Knives, Swords, Daggers & Blades by Harvey JS Withers and Tobias Capwell. It's a two volume collection filled with images of edged weapons (some polearms, not that many) that's a good resource and fairly compact. It's pretty Euro-centric, but there's still a decent amount of space dedicated to the swords and knives of Africa and Asia. The knife that the rakshasa is wielding in the image is an Indian pichangatti.

Bluespawn Godslayer

The blasphemous children of the dark goddess Tiamat are more in number and form than man can count. The true chromatic dragons (Red, Blue, White, Green and Black) make up only a portion of their ranks - the rest are lesser monsters, dwarf hybrids of creatures horribly twisted by Tiamat's unholy power.

The godslayers are some of the most feared of these. Mutated from the stock of blue dragons into hideous bipeds, they dedicate their lives to the slaughter of Tiamat's enemies. Godslayers take a barbaric delight in the use of melee weapons, which become charged with electricity by their innate draconic energies. Typically godslayers guard the lairs of venerable blue dragons, but are sometimes encountered abroad, roaming for good metallic dragons to torture and kill.

I tried out a more stark shading on this one, because I couldn't get anything more subtle to look right. It's not something I do too much if I can because it feels like a bit of a cop-out but there are some animations I love like Redline that make it work really nicely.

I tried to really push the "mutant" angle here, which is the one element that I like about dragonspawn - mostly they feel kind of mary-sueish (it's part dragon, part spider, part rhinoceros! super strong, no weaknesses! original character, do not steal!) and also they quite often look a bit silly. So I thought, well, the influence of an evil deity like Tiamat isn't going to produce some perfect man-dragon specimen - it's going to be this weird hybrid creature, something like the pasty human-alien thing in Alien: Resurrection, albeit insanely strong and tough. So I've given the guy two heads (two and a half if you count the little half-formed head poking out in the top right) and a little vestigial wing that isn't going to be flying anyone anywhere.

Alert readers will note that bluespawn godslayers do not, in fact, have a breath weapon but I thought the fire looked cool in the composition. And yay, we're back to no backgrounds again! Lazy art is best art.

- Joe

Sybillic Guardian

The Sybillic Guaridan is a psychic archon, being allies (and occasionally summoned servants) of psionic heroes. Like other archons, they dwell in Celestia, training in the arts of battle to do war with the infernal and abyssal hordes. However, these particular archons and other psionic creatures believe that a different war is coming, though magical divination can't actually confirm this. Perhaps their war will be one with the creatures of the Far Realm, or whatever horrifying races live beyond that.

You know what I always find difficult? Any aspect of graphic design. I'm fine with illustration, laying an image, character design, colour... But when it comes to setting up fonts and similar bits of text, it really gives me a headache. This also applies to things like runes and glyphs, since they're an infuriating combination of illustration and graphic design. It'd difficult to make magical writing look legit.

But I think I finally hit on something, since I'm actually fairly happy with the glyphs in this image, which I generated using a magic square. Each glyph means something, so if anybody wants to figure out what they mean, look to Saturn.

Dungeons & Drawings: BOOK VOLUME 1

So we've got a big announcement that we've kept under our collective hats for a while now!

We made a book.

Now available to buy, Dungeons & Drawings Vol. 1 clocks in at a sumptuous 93 full-colour pages, featuring 40 of our favourite Dungeons & Drawings redesigns. Each picture is accompanied by a description, some simple statistics, and a look into the real-world origins of each creature. Wow! Some illustrations are book-exclusive, too. Zinged!

Waitasec! "Vol. 1", you ask? Why, yes! With over 200 images on the blog, we're looking to make a whole series of these to sell at conventions and expos, as well as through the magical wonder of paypal and the internet.

Just check out some of these super-sweet shots of our handiwork! Pow! Blam!

Is it possible to imagine anything remotely more rad than this? THE ANSWER IS NO

"BUT BROSKIS," we hear you say, "HOW DO I GET HOLD OF SUCH AN ILLUSTRIOUS ORGAN OF BEAUTIFUL MONSTROUS GOODNESS?"

The answer is simple.  By clicking the button below and exchanging just £8 / ~$13 of your yank dollars through the magic of paypal (excl. postage, natch), we will send you a copy of this fine example of illustrative gorgeousness in the mail. It literally couldn't be easier!!!!!

Every purchase helps us keep going and increases the likelihood that we can get more stuff printed in the future. Because we love putting stuff on the internet, of course! But we also love the feel of a really nice print, and we want you guys to have that too!

Dungeons & Drawings: Vol. 1 will be available to buy this weekend at the London MCM Expo and at lots of other conventions across the UK as we attend them. If you see us, come by, say hi and have a look!

And, as always, thanks for supporting the site with your views and your interest! Posting has been slow lately due to working on the book & other factors, but the ultimate goal is always to post the highest quality material we can produce.  Keep checking back for updates!

- Blanca & Joe

REDUX MONTH: Devourer

Here's our fiiiiiiinal image of Redux Month here on Dungeons & Drawings, the soul-stealing Devourer!

It's a longstanding tradition here at Dungeons & Drawings that anything with the name "Month" in the title typically takes 2 - 3 x longer than a month. A record which remains unbroken! This time the delay is almost entirely my fault (usual moans of work PLUS A CERTAIN SPECIAL SOMETHING WE'LL BE ABLE TO ANNOUNCE SOON). Plus, you know, Pokemon, I guess? Message me on twitter (@torpordust) if you wanna exchange friend codes or something.

Anyway, for our final pair of pics we've reduxed the hell out of each other's least favourite images. I love what Blanca did with the Sphinx, so I had a go at taking the Devourer (one of my favourite undead creatures) and running with the design pretty far from the D&D original. He's pretty different, almost like a construct, with a big birdcage torso housing the harvested essences of his victims (although I really like the creature's "undeath" angle so I tried to keep that feel with the skeletal arms/legs). The victim of his soul-stealing is my wizard character Ovid, who I actually did another picture of over here which I like a bit more than this picture.

I'm trying to push my approach a bit in complexity, this time including a background with several light sources and a sort of twisted perspective + poses. I'm not too pleased with the result, as I think it comes across as busy, but it was a lot of work so I guess having it done is sort of satisfying. Anyway, to hell with it! It's posted. Here endeth Redux Month.

As always, I want to say thanks to everyone for hanging around for our three years of blogging monster redesigns. It seriously means a lot to both of us. Doing Redux Month has really hammered home the ways we've developed artistically through doing the blog and engaging with people like y'all, it's really heartening. So thankyou! Seriously!

Also, we'll be at the following conventions in England over the next couple of months. Come say hello!

- Joe

REDUX MONTH: Gynosphinx

For the our final entry into Redux Month, we're redoing images that the other person did but didn't especially like. We wrote some lists for each other and picked one creture. I chose to redo the gynosphinx, an image Joe did about two years ago.

The Sphinx we're most common with is a unique Greek creature, famous for her "four legs, two legs, three legs" riddle. Fun fact: some sources say that the Sphinx was actually the child of the Chimera and sister to the Nemean Lion (slain by Hercules as his first task). Historically, the Sphinx is actually a Greek creation, has no wings and has the head of a man.  D&D has that one too, and calls it the androsphinx.

I was originally gonna do this Sphinx in blue as a reference to one of the prettiest sphinxes I've seen, the Sphinx Ambassador for the Magic card. But I couldn't make the blue work and a lot of stuff I've done is blue and I guess it probably would've been more a rip off than a reference. So red it is.

REDUX MONTH: Yrthak

The flying merchants of Gth'yr are a common sight in most of the cities of the world. An ancient guild of peddlers, they grew from small beginnings in the aviary-towns of the southern mountains, trading wares from settlement to settlement, and have since steadily increased their reach over several hundred years to cover most of the world. As their name implies, the merchants ferry their goods by air, having for many years employed the services of the great Yrthaks - enormous, sightless, crocodilian flying creatures- to aid them. The merchants have tamed the beasts through use of certain combinations of wind chimes and bells (to which the Yrthaks are, of course, highly sensitive), which also serve as a distinctive herald for the traders' arrival!

Wow! This one took a while, but I'm quite happy with it. I'm almost afraid to post the old Yrthak drawing I hate it so much, but for the sake of posterity (and reassuring myself I've gotten better) here it is. Don't laugh.

The creature is modeled a bit off those weird Pteranodons that sort of look like giraffes. It's sort of inspired by the Dinotopia series of books, which I liked a lot as a kid and rediscovered recently.

- Joe

REDUX MONTH: Will O Wisp

Redux number three is the Will O Wisp. I think that out of all of the images I've done for this blog, that particular one is my most hated. Partially because it's so ugly but also because it feels like the intention I had behind it was pretty strong and was unable to carry it out. I'd been inspired by a book called Art Forms from the Ocean, a collection of prints by Ernst Haeckl of microscopic sea animals and plants. They're all pictures of quite beautifully geometric living things.

Which I guess means I copped out a bit by doing a good deal more typical Will O Wisp: a floating flame. But I'm still more pleased with this one than the older version. At least this is well drawn and kinda cute.

Fun fact: an alternate name for the Will O Wisp is the Hinkypunk. I remember reading that in one of the Harry Potter books (Prisoner of Azkaban, I think), describing the Hinkypunk as a one-legged creature that carries a lantern to lead people into bogs. I always thought that it was a creature that Rowling had made up, but it would seem it's a legit alternate version of the Will O Wisp.

Fun fact number two: a Hinkypunk (i.e. the one-legged dude) appears towards the end of Spirited Away, leading Chihiro to the Zeniba's house.

REDUX MONTH: Spriggan

Here's my second image of Redux Month, the Spriggan! You can see the old version here (if you wanna).

I faffed for ages with this one and I'm sort of lukewarm on it, but I still like it better than the original. I actually hate looking at the old one because at the time I was experimenting a lot with this attempt at scratchy black linework that looks kinda brushy in imitation of artists like Nate Powell and Paul Pope, but I could never get it looking right because my basic drawing skills aren't up to it. I guess I quite like the sheer amount of hair he develops after "hulking out" (Spriggans, in case you didn't know, can grow in size from a small gnome-like creature to a gigantic gorilla monster) - here the change in appearance is less extreme - he just sort of thickens and his hair becomes a little tuftier. Looking between them I think my approach to linework is better in general now, I feel like I don't have to "fake" a lot of the things I used to.

The dude here is modeled on a gibbon, which are my favourite apes. 

Sorry about the slow posting this month, I'm working full-time on a commercial job and I'm trying really hard to keep the quality up so I don't feel like I've regressed!!

- Joe

REDUX MONTH: Frost Giant

My second image for Redux Month, redoing the Frost Giant. This is a case of me liking the design, but not liking so much how the image itself was acually made. I found the image a bit cramped, to its detriment.

So I've still kept the whole vaguely arctic circle thing to it. I like to think this particular Frost Giant retired after a few battles, then he and his favourite winter wolf buddy decided to retire to a comparatively peaceful life on sheep herding.

I know in a lot of fantasy games and some fantasy lit, giants are usually pretty dumb brutes. But in quite a few fairy tales and such, giants tend to own and manage large portions of land. In Cornish stories, they have castles and rich tin mines. Adventurers usually find a way to take this from them. Puss in Boots steals a kingdom from a giant, which includes vast farmlands being kept by various farmers. This goes as far back as the Odyssey (probably even further back), where Odysseus comes across an islands of cyclopes, where they keep great herds of goats and sheep. Odysseus and his crew (the ones that haven't been eaten by Polyphemus), manage to escape by clinging to the underside of the sheep.

REDUX MONTH: Spirit Naga

Hey! So here I am, finally, with my first choice for Redux Month on Dungeons & Drawings. The Spirit Naga! You can see the old (rubbish) version here.

Something I've learned over the last couple of years is to (as a friend put it) "own my mistakes". I'd like to think I'm fairly critical of my art (like 70% of the time, anyway), and I think it's a good ability to be able to look at the things you do and dispassionately asses what you've done well or badly, and how you can improve. A big part of this that I have to really work at is the acknowledgement of the fact that sometimes I'm going to do things that fall short of my expectations! You have to be able to get over that stuff without freaking out. I used to quite often upload an image here, and then tweak bits of it and reupload it, sometimes for days on end. Nowadays I do feel more confident with my work, and I'm more content to draw a line and say "it's finished" and leave it on the blog and to hell with it.

However!

From time to time it's fun to indulge in some exercises like Redux Month, when we can look back at our past art with a collected, critical mind and see how we might do it differently now! The old Spirit Naga was a panic-upload that I didn't work on for very long - snake bodies are always hard for me to make interesting, so I just knocked it out. Here I've tried to make the design more interesting (and colourful!) whilst also invigorating the pose a bit. Hope you like it!

- Joe

PS If you're wondering, the green bracelet things are what I thought might pass for Naga jewelry. The little dangly bits are supposed to be like earrings, although as I was drawing them I thought it might be cool if they contained bells, or something that would create a disturbing jangly sound as the creature moves around.

REDUX MONTH: Satyr

Sup peeps.

Dungeons and Drawings has been up and about as a blog for three years now. And while the blog has 200+ pics of them and we try quite hard to make all of 'em good, the truth is that there's quite a few that we feel we could've done a better job on. But since we like to do a different image every week, that stops us from just doing the same monster over and over until we're satisfied with it.

That's what anniversaries are for.

So for the next four weeks we're gonna be looking at the images we've been unhappy with and redo them.

My first choice for Redux Month is the Satyr, the goat-legged creature of Greek mythology. While I'm not as unhappy with that image as I am with others, it's one I felt I could definitely do better. The old version seemed a little too rough to me (I was using nib pens and real art materials aren't something I'm especially good with) and the colours didn't seem as well thought out, resulting in, I felt, an overall quite dull image.

The newer Satyr is inspired by the Valais Blackneck, a really awesome breed of goat, half black, half white. The kids are especially cute. They look like they're wearing clothes!