This month Annie and I were scheduled to exhibit at Illuxcon in PA. In the months running up to the show we both had been working on a lot of personal projects and had a lot of new work we were excited to share.

Alas, we ended up missing it after coming down with some school-related sickness. So, today I thought I’d share some of the pencil drawings that missed the show. They are from a series largely inspired by selling at shows like Illuxcon, Spectrum and Dragoncon, from the perspective of a seller. These drawings are explorations for larger paintings I plan to do for next year’s Dungeon Master Series calendar.

And on the subject of having fun with pencils, something I’ve always really enjoyed is sketching my idea out in non-photo blue first before doing the final, tight drawing in graphite or brown pencil. The combination of colors adds a bit of history to the image, separating the original sketch from the final drawing and allowing to the viewer to see little hints of the path you took in making it. Something that has always found really rewarding.

The color can also be used later for stray accents and to add some limited palette color. It’s something I’ve always loved in Dean Cornwell’s drawings and it has such a classic charm about it.

I drifted away from it (years ago), largely because all the extraneous color slowed things down and tended to make things harder to paint digitally over. And I guess I’ve been a little less concerned about that recently, since Adobe Photoshop betrayed the art community when they stole our work without our consent in their ongoing effort to replace us with AI.  And ever since I have been less and less interested in painting digitally, and more and more interested in just having fun with pencil again.

Most of these have been made with little or no plan, and are just free-wheeling explorations of a market for dark wizards.

I hope all of you had fun at Illuxcon this year. We missed all of you and hope to see you next time around.

And have a Happy Halloween!

-jg