DRAGON MONTH: Black Dragon

Black dragons are the most cruel-tempered of the chromatic dragons. Where blue dragons are vain, reds are tyrannical, greens are two-faced and whites are primal, blacks are petty. They despise all beautiful things. These dragons are of corpse-like apperance, growing more and more skeletal with age, and live in fetid swamps. They surround themselves in darkness, slime and putrefaction. The meat they eat is of creatures they've eaten and allowed to rot in the stinking pools of their undewater homes. Black dragons are ambushers; their chosen homes have too many trees for flight, and its easier to lie in the cool mud and wait for some hapless victim to walk by.

Tried to do something a little bit more unusual with this dragon. I ended up taking a lot of influence from Oceanic and Inuit masks.

DRAGON MONTH: Sunwyrm

The Sunwyrm is one of the less common species of dragon, falling neither into the chromatic or metallic families. Anatomically, it is markedly unusual - its adult form is much smaller than your average dragon, though still twice the size of a man. It also possesses a double set of forelimbs and back legs, with makes it no pushover in physical combat. Most notably, several parts of a Sunwyrm's body can be made to glow with a blinding light, in particular a large globe at the end of the creature's tail and its outstretched wing membranes. In many cases this will blind a potential foe outright, but even more amazingly the creature can actually transform its entire body into a mass of pure, incandescent energy, becoming incorporeal and able to pass through solid matter. Creatures who the Sunwyrm pass through in this way are not harmed, however, so the creature will more often use this form to escape. Sunwyrms commonly nest incorporeally within desert sand dunes, and take to the sky by day to hide within the blinding sunlight and ambush prey from above.

Our third Dragon Week submission! I feel like I'm using a lot of yellow, lately. I'm gonna redraw the wing on this one so you can actually see the body a little better, but we've been pretty slack on updates lately so I thought I'd upload this for now.

DRAGON MONTH: Green Dragon

Green Dragons are your fairly classic creatures: they're huge, they live in forests, they eat faeires and elves and other good creatures. Out of the five chromatic dragons, the Greens are one of the two lawful species (the other being Blue). However, unlike their Blue cousins, Green Dragons aren't creatures of honour. Be wary of them. Though they pride themselves on appearing civil and being masters of the spoken word, this is a paper-thin disguise. Green dragons are jealous, covetous creatures. Their words mask insults and their promises are broken when their mood sours, and you'll find yourself burnt from the inside out by their chlorine breath.

My contribution to DRAGON MONTH, ladies and gents. Behold our attempts to these creatures interesting again, since Smaug cemented the scaly lizard look. Admittedly, I'm not off to the best start with the whole "let's make this original" thing. I'll try something weirder with my next dragon. With this one I ended up trying the pixelly-style thing, which is a lot harder that I'd originally anticipated.

I've started a special tagging method over at Reference Reference. Now you can look at specific images that served as guides for the Green Dragon.

DRAGON MONTH: Gold Dragon

Moreso than any of their metallic brethren, Gold Dragons are creatures of utmost law and virtue. They are known to be kind and fantastically intellgent, devoting much of their attention to righting wrongs and helping the weak. Gold Dragons appear to take at times an almost parental role when dealing with lesser creatures, whether lending a helping wing to a besieged adventurer or scolding an opportunistic treasure-thief.

To celebrate our 100th post (it's kind of a joint thing with the blog's first year anniversary) this fair month of August is going to be Dragon Month. Yes, you may have noticed a conspicuous absence of fantasy's bescaled poster boys from our pages so far - early on we decided to hold off from illustrating them until we reached post number 100.

If the idea of this blog is to challenge peoples' perception of what standard fantasy art should look like, then dragons are pretty high on the hit-list of "stuff to challenge". Especially on the internet, dragons must be some of the most popular and often-drawn fantasy creatures ever, and a quick search on somewhere like Deviantart will give you a good cross-section of the visual tropes they tend to subscribe to. Seriously, go look at it. See that? That's what we're gonna try to avoid. Not because it's bad, but because being weird and different makes us feel special. ;_;

Stay tuned for the rest of Dragon Month and see if you like it!

Wee Jas, Goddess of Death and Magic

Wee Jas, the Witch Goddess, occupies a unique position in the magical pantheon of deities and demigods. She dwells in blood, death and magic, but is not inherently evil. Her followers and clerics, most of them necromancers and powerful wizards, are some of the most dangerous men (and women) alive (and dead). She is distinguished from other gods of death such as Nerull (Foe of all Good and Enemy of Life) by the fact that she venerates death as an inevitability, rather than something to be cheated or dealt out wantonly. The dead are taught to be respected and remembered, that the living may be treated the same way in turn when their time comes. Her alignment is Lawful Neutral, and her favoured weapon is the dagger.

To commemorate this blog's continual maintanance for ONE WHOLE YEAR (!), this weeks' "creatures" (can we call them that?) are actually Gods from the main D&D pantheon. Blanca and I have illustrated gods that are on pretty differing ends of the spectrum so it's interesting to see how they've turned out.

This depiction of Wee Jas is a little unusual if you've ever seen any literature on her, which mostly describes her as a beautiful, red-headed woman with skull-themed jewelery. I'm not a fan of depicting gods as visually identical to humans, though, they need to be a little more abstract or symbolic to pack more of a punch. This actually affects pretty much all of the gods as listed in the Deities & Demigods book - most of them are illustrated in the same manner you'd draw an ordinary PC; you might not even get that they were deities if you weren't told so. In contrast, there's this one little icon of Wee Jas in the Player's Handbook that I really like - it has the look of a skull, but it also has these weird flame/tendril/ribbon things that seem to grow out of it, getting this combination of magic-plus-death that for me sums up the goddess. I based my design on that, trying to depict the Ruby Sorceress in a flayed, corpse-like body, roiling in gory magic, deep in her home dimension of Acheron.

Pelor, The Shining One

Pelor is a top god of the Greyhawk pantheon. His followers are many; he is creator of all things good, god of healing, and he who feels the sun rise. He lives in a golden citadel in Elysium. The fortress is surrounded by beautiful fields, farms and orchards, and is inhabited by various war-like angels and peaceful saints.

It's a rare thing for a religion not to have the Sun as one of their main gods. Even the most primitive civilizations could tell that life is sustained by that big ball of fire in the sky (except for the Greeks it seems, who made their main god king of thunderstorms).

I'm similar to Joe's frame of mind in that I don't think divine beings should always be shown as human. Deities and Demigods kinda disappoints me from an artistic point of view, since the gods just don't look that interesting. Pelor's some old guy in golden robes, Kord's a buff barbarian, Olidammara's a bard, etc... They don't look very divine.

I was always quite fond of old myths, where the reason the gods looked the way they do to us it because their true divine form is so dazzling that it can kill you. The Zeus and Semele is the most famous example. I'm pretty certain I came across a Hindu myth with a similar thing, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Bible had a couple of instances too. Well, I think the whole dazzling true form deal is pretty apt for a the god of that thing that you should never look directly into.


HAPPY ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY, DUNGEONS & DRAWINGS.

Necropolitan

When you reach the tower where the princess is held captive, you find a withered woman dressed in silks, gems and a delicately coiffed wig. Lipstick would do little to emphasize something that's long since shrunken back so close to the skull. And what would eyeliner do to eyes already so shadowed within such dark eyesockets? You'd be horrified, but your mission was to rescue the princess of Nocturnus, city of the undead.

Necropolitans were a new player race introduced in the horror-themed Libris Mortis. The idea with them is that you asked already-existing necropolitans for permission to join their numbers. If they accepted you, you go through a long and painful process where life energy is drained through your body and is replaced with negative energy. Unlike, say, a lich, another intelligent undead whose own willing transformation from living to dead involves concentrated evil, necropolitans aren't necessarily members of the dark side.

The book kinda implies that they're just really reserved, serious scholars who'd prefer to be left alone by anyone who thinks the undead are shambling abominations.

Terror Bird

Terror Birds are apex predators. They're tall, flightless animals with long, strong necks and large, hard beaks that can cut through flesh. Their small, atrophied wings bear two small useless claws. They run as fast as horses and hunt with the cunning of wolves.

For a creature with such a dramatic name, Terror Birds are actually pretty benign. In fact, this creature and its name, is an actual prehistoric creature that lived in the Miocene period (23 to 5 million years ago). Their scientific name is Phorusrhacidae and are thought to be the ancestors of Seriemas birds, something a little smaller and less lethal.

If you think these guys are goofy, just put a little though into it. These are extremely fast creatures, up to 3 metres tall (10 feet). The smallest of the species was about 1 metre (a little over 3 feet). They're basically like ostriches. You know how scary ostriches can be? Well, imagine if they actually wanted to eat you.

A nice monster if you want to use it in a prehistoric campaign setting.

Gloom

The saying goes: "If you want someone dead, you hire a killer... if you want someone dead, you hire a Gloom".

Monstrous assassins of the highest caliber, Glooms silently do the bidding of whomever happens to command them. Never armed with more than a cruel dagger, these faceless creatures demonstrate cold-blooded murder with such a clarity of form that it could be called artful. Nothing is known of a Gloom's expected payment (they certainly have no use for gold, or trinkets, or power) but once the transaction is carried out the demise of the victim is certain.

Again, the more observant of our viewers will have noticed my conspicuous abscence from these pages for the last few weeks (to which a number of contributants could be named) but rest assured, I'll be trying my hardest again. This one was obviously a little rushed, but hopefully I'll be able to make more time in the future.

Glooms are from the Epic Level Handbook, which at first seems a little weird given that they don't have much in the way of lore or other bells and whistles - they're literally just an incredibly scary CR 25 creature armed with a knife and some rudimentary (for ELH monsters) special abilites. But (as with a lot of my favourites) it's their simplicity that makes them interesting. Where do they come from? Why do they do what they do? I imagine them as this forbidden "last resort" for when royals or high-level spellcasters who absolutely, positively, have to have someone dead. Like, the kind of deal you wouldn't want to admit to.

Wendigo

The Wendigo is a malevolent spirit of the cold wastes, driven by purely by hunger. It has no feet, and leaves no tracks on the ground. Sometimes its body turns misty and can't be seen but out of the corner of your eye. You're more likely to hear him that see him, his gibbering laughter sweeping across the empty landscape like with.

So the winner of last week's poll was Middle Eastern / Indian monsters and North American monsters, with an equal amount of votes. I decided to pick North American monsters, since they're under-represented in modern fantasy culture outside the odd shaman, thunderbird and, of course, Wendigo.

Fun fact! Apparently the word Wendigo comes from the proto-Algonquian "wintekowa", possibly meaning "owl". At least according to the internet. Maybe they were freaked out by the hooting of owls at night? Anyway, that's why I decided to give the Wendigo a more rounded head instead of something wolfy or deer-like, like a lot of modern fantasy does.

I decided to play on the description in the D&D books that says they have a Corner of the Eye ability. Whenever a wendigo Wind Walks, they can never been looked at directly, always seeming to appear just out of your field of vision. This was pretty tricky, and I decided to try to employ the Hidden Face illusion trick. I'm not sure how well it worked though, so you guys'll have to tell me.

Man, I'm late this week.

Did a little bit more work with the tags this past week. Monsters are now also orginized by alignment (chaotic, lawful, evil, good, neutral) and whether they're template creatures.

Yakfolk

Yakfolk are a race of heavy-furred bovine men who make their homes in the beautiful verdant valleys between mountain peaks. They stand smaller than a minotaur, but are much more civilized than their brutish counterparts. They dress in fine silks and decorate their horns with silver and tassles. Despite their utopian towns and culture, Yakfolk are brutal slavers and each member of their race usually has many human, elven and dwarf slaves. They're learned in magical arts, with the innate abilities to fuse their bodies with that of another humanoid creature and to control evil genies. Their signature weapons are the falchion and the magical staff.

The winner for last week's poll was high fantasy and diplomatic mission. Originally I was going to do the drow, but matriarchal black elves that live underground and worship an evil spider goddess aren't high fantasy enough. Genie-commanding, body-melding cow-men are high fantasy enough. As for diplomatic mission, you'd probably want to make some sort of treaty with them. I would. Either that or run away.

Special thanks to Joe with helping me figure out an interesting way to set up the layout and style of this image.

Also I think I'm done with all the blend shapes for my goblin. Currently working on the tongue and figuring out how to set up some controls.

Kenku

The Kenku are a race of flightless corvid humanoids that live in cities. They're of evil disposition and are especially prone to theft, which they execute in large groups. The Kenkus small size, ability to mimic sounds and strong sense of cooperation means they're often contracted as thieves, spies and assassins by those who'd rather not implicate themselves in that sort of crime.

I consider kenku in the same family as kobolds and goblins: absurd, cute, pathetic little creatures that are somehow supposed to imply a threat. They're a more dishonorable version of the tengu, a crow-man creature of Japanese mythology known for their mastery of the sword. The Oriental Adventures book has the more faithful version of the monster.

The winner of the poll was city monsters.I'm really late this week because I keep working on the goblin stuff instead. I finished modelling the character itself and all his clothing and have started working on the skeleton. I've also bee working on the blend shapes for his head, which is really fun. I'm going to have to figure out how to stop the teeth from popping out of the cheeks when the face morphs.


Edit: Improved the image some with colours, shading and floury footprints.