DnD Pinup Challenge : Goliath

Art Order is a great blog run by Jon Schindehette (senior art director of Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast), bursting with tips and info for aspiring illustrators.

Recently, I discovered their Ning community and I joined (you can view my page here). They have regular challenges, incliuding a Dnd Pinup challenge.

I am a huge fan of pinup art, from Vargas to Elvgren to Sorayama, and I couldn't resist this challenge. The requirements for the challenge were to pick a race, so I picked Goliath. Here is my final illustration:


Goliath Pinup
Graphite, blue pencil and Photoshop CS3, x cm @450 dpi


My intial choice was a Tiefling, as in this sketch. It was more playful, and I was looking closely at my Gil Elvgren book from Taschen which is an amazing resource.




I decided to change to Goliath. I wasn't happy with the Tiefling sketch and there were a LOT of tiefling entries, but the main reason was Frank Frazetta died. He was such a huge influence on me, and one of the first artists to really grab me. So, with this picture I wanted to put a bit of him in it.

I made a new sketch on scrap butcher's paper, scanned it, printed it in light red and then drew on top of that:




From this sketch, I scanned it in again and printed an A3 version (two A4s taped together) for lightboxing. Here is the final line drawing before colouring in photoshop for the final: