Torchbearer

I have always enjoyed doing work for Luke Crane's Burning Wheel game books. He recently contacted me to do 3 spot illustrations for his newest project Torchbearer with game designer Thor Olavsrud. It is a throw back game to old fashion dungeon crawl, Dungeons and Dragons type games.
They are funding the project on Kickstarter which still has 4 days left as I type this blog post. It is doing very well, so far attracting enough supporters to take it to $40,000 over the initial funding goal. Serious KickStart! I probably should have charged about $10,000 more than I did, but I suppose that is not really fair.

Varg Submerged
Copyright © 2013, Burning Wheel and Richard Luschek

The format for each of these illustrations was a challenge, at 2" X 7". Most of the illustration requests were tough as well- the description for that shown above being:

 "Varg submerged, holding breath and swimming into a secret tunnel at the bottom of a natural cistern while insectile legs probe the water behind".  

I was not sure if I could do vertical or horizontal, so I tried both at first and sent Luke the following quick sketches.

Studies for Varg Submerged
Copyright © 2013, Burning Wheel and Richard Luschek 

I was initially more excited about the vertical image, as I thought it showed the depth and space I needed. But the format of the books required horizontal so I had to push that one to finish. In the end I think it made for a much better image, I has better lines and is a simple design.
I sketched the final design out in pencil, inked it, and scanned it into Photoshop to paint in the the values. This project was unlike my typical work, but the challenge was quite fun.