Shield painters Unite!

Just a quick peak into a day in my life. Here's a photo of a typical afternoon writing my blog, shown in a cafe just pouring my heart out to all my readers. My squire is getting pretty good at taking photos don't you think?

After having to catch up a bit after the 4 days at Gen Con I finally got the latest HarnQuest finished (can you believe I honestly thought I would get some drawing done while I was there?).
I was very happy with how it turned out. My deadline was end of August and I proudly sent off my last illustration at 11:45p.m. on August 31st. So, technically I made my deadline. Right?

I will do a few posts about a few of the illustrations I did for this very Laranian HarnQuest.
It contains Order of Hyvrik (Larani), Order of the Checkered Shield, Dyrisa Laranian Temple, and an updated Classic article Chyrefal Castle.

This was a fun HQ for me as I have always liked the Laranians. The articles did a good job of giving these guys some depth, with in-fighting and religious differences. It made them more believable and realistic.
One of my favorite pieces was in the Checkered Shield article.
I did a few versions that I thought I would show for fun, before settling on the final one.

To the Pits!,Copyright © 2013, Columbia Games, Inc. and Richard Luschek

There was some discussion about whether or not the shield should have the full heraldry of the order, or just be a checkered shield. While I tend to fight for what ever looks best, I think the end result made the most sense.
At first I drew a version with the full chapter symbol- which shows Mendiz- the red winged lion with the shield.

To the Pits II!,Copyright © 2013, Columbia Games, Inc. and Richard Luschek

While technically that is the chapter's symbol, they are called the Checkered Shield. We decided that while this symbol is the badge and may be sewn on the tunic of some or all the knights,  the shield, like the name, should just be checkered. Hotz had set this as canon on the Dead Winter cover years ago. I also did a look around on the web and found some fanon articles that showed the same opinion. So, the simple shield was used on the opening page.
Of course photoshop makes it very easy to make these changes and experiment with different looks. Something about the idea of a battle field full of checkered shields that just seemed more bad ass to me.
I suppose both work as long as the Agrikan is cast into the Pits!

1994 Plymouth Voyager with Harnic Shields

Of course the other reason for the decision was that I had just painted some some shields for decoration for the Gen Con booth and I was not going to change it.