It began, as these things usually do, with an adventure.
Not my adventure, mind you! I spend most of my time drawing largely stuck in the same desk chair every day, and am (generally) not the type to enter long-abandoned temples filled with loot. But! Talking with Ken and Brandon about the new starter adventure, 'The Vault of the Panacean Jungle', made it fairly easy to visualize the environment our new players would be exploring.
I started by going back to this excellent piece by Aleksandra Wojtas of an Archivist Explorer working in the Panacean Jungle. Her environmental work here is amazing and gives a great glimpse into that specific region of Dema.
Next step was to create my own creative brief - if we were to boil down our goals with this module cover into a few points ideal for showing off a Starter Kit, here's what we wanted to accomplish:
Showcase the original Redsky species and classes
Make sure our audience knows that this adventure is in a temple in a jungle
Bring out the more sci-fi aspects of Redsky by having our subjects wield Eldertech
Adventure!
The most important part of delivering a great piece of art is to get the composition right. There was a lot of discussions with Brandon about what characters we wanted to depict, so we started there; the fine details of the image could be sketched out later. We settled on having an Archivist Sage, Sporespawn Rogue, Wakewalker Hunter, and Featherfolk Wordsmith. We also knew that the foreground characters should be wielding various kinds of Eldertech! There was a lot of shuffling character sketches around before the final placements were decided.
As far as their poses and attitude, we went with a more "cautious" approach to entering a dangerous dungeon, rather than an active battle, leaving what awaits inside a surprise to the players.
Of course, lighting in a dark dungeon is a big problem. To help with illumination, the Archivist in the lead was given a big Eldertech "torch", killing two birds with one stone (sorry, Mr. Featherfolk!). The torch, along with the rim lighting from the temple's entrance, made sure that the scene would be plausibly well-lit. Next, I set out to tackle the colors of the image and work out the background, to give them a proper scene to be in. I set out on finding some cooler tones for the characters to be wearing, to help them stand out against the warmer tones of the jungle vault and plant life that will eventually be behind them. I worked out a rough idea of the background details in Blender 3D, a handy tool to ensure my perspective and characters all match up nicely!
With my colors and background established it was time for me to set the major light source from the Eldertech torch and start rendering the painting. As you can see from the color rough (another word for draft) I gave myself an early idea of the light source, but I still needed to really push it to give it that feeling of a bright white light.
From here all major aspects of the image were already mostly set in stone. I adjust some details and colors as I see fit to marry the whole cast together and not let any one character stand out too much from the rest. I set out from here to really push each characters into their respective cultural garb, as exploring those details really helps push the world of Dema to new and exciting places. I wanted the image to have some nice lore-details such as the Wakewalker being an ex-Kadakoi warrior turned dungeon-delver, or the stone carvings inside the vault. Who carved them and what do they represent? And what are all these bones??! Below is the final work and I hope you're ready to delve into the adventure!
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