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Pachycrocuta — The Good Folk - concepts
Published: 2009-06-22 05:00:03 +0000 UTC; Views: 1222; Favourites: 21; Downloads: 70
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There's a longish story here.I'm still doing art more for emotional survival these days.
A while back, I discovered the blog for one of WotC's art editors. Among other things he runs these neat little concept art contests, which I'm too chicken to enter - these contests always attract much, much better artists than me. The contests are always really good thought exercises that plug into how D&D 4e is set up.
One of the contests was designing easily recognizable silhouettes that represent the four player character roles in new-style D&D (striker, leader, controller, defender). I thumbnailed several different types of character silhouette, and wound up working up the "fey" batch of concepts.
The little guys at the bottom are recognizably "buckawn" from old D&D - but the other three are my design. I like the idea that the fey wouldn't look entirely human, and giving them deer-inspired features seemed to go with their forest-loving natures. And yes, the guy at the top is a deer-human-wolf sort of figure.
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Comments: 12
So where was this blog again? I'd like to see the other contest entries...
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I agree with everyone else that you should enter. You Did the art already, anyway, so why not?
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Those look fantastic, especially the Buckawn which I to remember for I collect the old art & books 
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Thanks!
Mmm, I'm really mixed on the 4e art thing. I really like some of the artists they have in - like Wayne Reynolds is great, and Francis Tsai, and William O'Connor of course, and really anyone doing art for WotC is great.
But the art style winds up being kinda generic-fantasy, it's not really medieval-fantasy anymore, and even though it's really competent, I kinda miss having that edge of historical realism. That, and I really loved some of the art for 2e, actually, because of the more diverse settings - all the really weird steampunkish DiTerlizzi stuff, and Brom doing all the full-on pulp stuff for Dark Sun.
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I don't mind the artists or their styles per se, but the whole layout of the books themselves (not their fault) just lacks any real ascetic flair. I do enjoy they're making fey play more of a serious role like Fomorians being the big bad of their underdark, and in the newest monster manual they brought back Firbolgs
But yeah I agree the 2nd ed books really had that personal touch with certian artists contributing to specific settings, loved DiTerlizzi's Planescape book, sought them out just for the art alone. I like Brom;s style but wasn't really a Dark Sun fan mostly due to psionics in general I'm not big about
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Oooh, a wolf-taur-deer-thingy. *squees*
I am entirely too potty about taurs these days
Anyway, you are an incredibly talented artist. Yes, there are artists out there who are alot better than you are but there are /always/ better artists out there. The person you should be trying to be a better artist than is yourself. That is the only person you are really competing with.
So I'll look forward to possibly seeing more taurs, and you look forward to improving your own artistic skills.
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I agree with *ColinChapman . You have a distinctive style, a lot of skill and some really cool ideas. You should enter!
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Seriously, mate, you need to have more faith in your abilities. You have a distinctive, personal style, one that I admire. I wouldn't have e-mailed you r.e. possibly freelancing else.
Colin
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That's no reason to not enter! How good a piece of art is IS subjective, after all.
As always, great stuff.
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