Hi Josh! I heard you mention in an interview that you have/used to have an interest in illustration. What illustrators do you enjoy/are inspired by, and (if it’s not too much to ask) would you mind sharing any drawing you’ve created?
Yeah, growing up it’s all I ever thought I would do. My dad is a bronze sculptor and that got me interested in art in general. When I started playing RPGs, I got more into fantasy art and illustration. The TSR staff artists of the 80s and early 90s – Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Fred Fields, Brom, Keith Parkinson, Clyde Caldwell, Robh Ruppel – were my heroes. Also a lot of the regular contributing artists that TSR used for Dragon and Dungeon magazines as well as interior illustrations: Valerie Valusek, Stephen Fabian, Jeff Dee, Jim Holloway, Tom Baxa, Jennell Jaquays – the list goes on.
I think a number of historical illustrators were also very inspirational: Pauline Baynes, Arthur Rackham, J.C. Leyendecker, Alphonse Mucha, Albrecht Dürer, Bernie Wrightson, and Maxfield Parrish, to name a few.
These days I think my tastes are a little broader. I still love fantasy illustrators – Karla Ortiz, Wes Burt, Eduoard Guiton, Emily Cheeseman, and Jana Schirmer are some of my faves – but I also appreciate more traditional illustration from artists like Wes Allsbrook, Christoph Niemann, and Emily Carroll (usually listed as a comic artist but I’ll put her here anyway because she’s great).
I should also say that although most of the 2D artists I’ve worked with are more concept artists than illustrators, I’ve had incredible fortune in working with an almost innumerable list of phenomenally talented people. The artists on my current project, Hannah Kennedy and Soojin Paek, really are extraordinary.
I can’t draw that well anymore – if I ever did. I stopped around my sophomore or junior year of high school for a variety of reasons, so the things I do look pretty amateurish. I only work digitally now, in part because it’s much more forgiving.
This is a portrait I did for my Ars Magica character, a Tremere certamen specialist named Venzi Lüin. I tried doing it in the style of a Banner Saga character and I think it turned out okay.
From the same campaign, a Cathar perfect, Bertranz de Tolosa.
This is an incomplete sketch of a Disfavored soldier from Tyranny. To be clear, this was done like way, way before any actual concepting had been done – maybe before it was even called Tyranny. I was trying to capture the exaggerated style of Eduoard Guiton, whose Cadwallon art was really captivating to me.