Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition - tiny preview!

You can see a tiny snippet of some of the work I made for the 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons previewed at The Dungeon Bastard's website: http://www.dungeonbastard.com/?p=836

I painted the landscape/backdrop.

Ambient Design/ArtRage Interview

I've been quizzed again! This time by the good people at Ambient Design, the makers of the best painting software in the world - ArtRage.

http://www.artrage.com/artist-feature-jon-hodgson/

Red Bubble Interview

The goodly folk at Red Bubble recently gave me a right good interviewing!: http://blog.redbubble.com/2014/07/featured-artist-jon-hodgsons-interview/

You can see my RedBubble gallery here.

The Witch King of Angmar

©2014 Sophisticated Games Ltd and Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd

Now then. So Rivendell for The One Ring rpg came out in PDF today, so I have a lot of art to share. Let's cut to the chase. Here's my rendition of The Witch King.

It's always a challenge to paint these huge characters. One thing Francesco (the game's designer) and I talked about time and time again was that Tolkien describes the Witch King as "masked". Now that can have a lot of different interpretations, and I suspect the most direct meaning is that he's swathed in some sort of shroud across his "face", in as much as he has a face... and that gives you some insight to my thinking on this one.

One of the things that frightens me about the Nazgûl is that they are ancient. And I'm keen to get some of that into the visuals. The idea of an ancient, masked, sorcerer king, with some hints of the ancient exotic about him seems a good fit. The long distant past is a foreign county - when we look at artefacts of the bronze age we see a very different aesthetic than later early medieval stylings. I wanted some of that in there for The Witch King.

And so we took the chance and gave him a literal mask. There's echoes of Mycenae in there, maybe a little Persian styling. But neither one is too present hopefully.

The pose was also very important and I spent a lot of time on silhouettes to get the sloped, slightly inhuman feel. No arms was a definite thing I settled on very quickly.

As usual this kind of thing won't please everyone. But hey, what can you do? 

Background graphics by the mighty Paul Bourne.

Find out more about this supplement for The One Ring rpg here:http://www.cubicle7.co.uk/the-one-ring-rivendell-pre-order-now-open/


Middle-earth, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the characters, items, events and places therein are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Saul Zaentz Company d/b/a Middle-earth Enterprises and are used under license by Sophisticated Games Ltd and their respective licensees.

The One Ring - Rivendell

Hello!

Cubicle 7 are previewing various pieces of art from the forthcoming Rivendell supplement for The One Ring Roleplaying Game, (along with lots of tasty game info over on their website), here's a selection of pieces shown so far.

All images ©2014 Sophisticated Games Ltd and Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd

Middle-earth, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the characters, items, events and places therein are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Saul Zaentz Company d/b/a Middle-earth Enterprises and are used under license by Sophisticated Games Ltd and their respective licensees.

Some (long winded) advice.

Original posted on my FB profile, but sufficiently well received to warrant a repost here:

So I don't often write advice for illustrators any more. I used to - a lot. But then I found myself more and more reading advice other people gave, thinking "this person sounds like an idiot" and then I thought "well I guess I must sound like an idiot too" and so I mostly stopped. Who wants to sound like an idiot?

But I'm going to risk that again just now. I've enjoyed talking with friends about art business stuff today and I have some thoughts I wanted to share.

Now the preface is probably going to be longer than the advice, but humour me.

Love and Money

Something I’ve seen slink into almost all conversations about freelance work is the idea of love vs money.  As if these things are opposed forces - a dichotomy which I believe to be false.