For today's Daily Drabble I'm going to be giving a sneak peek at the development of a large-scale portfolio piece currently in the works. 

It began with the desire to paint an epic fantasy scene in the vein of Dungeons & Dragons or J.R.R. Tolkien. Because I was working with extremely limited resources for reference, I chose to go with a mage battle. I was in the middle of revamping a Ravenloft based campaign for one of my RPG groups at the time I started, so I set it in a broody gothic castle-- lots of encroaching darkness and vivid magical highlights to breathe life into the world. I wanted a complex narrative that allowed for a lot of different interpretations, so I included three figures: two mages confronting each other, with a third creeping in from the shadows in the foreground alongside the viewer.

To paint a picture like this, you need to do a lot of groundwork before you start. First, you need to work out your composition. I knew that I wanted an architecturally complex environment, so I jumped ahead and worked on the next step before I solidified my composition.

This is where things get fun. What's that next step, you ask? References. For realistic artwork, I require a lot of detailed references to put together a complete picture. As far as I know, there aren't any broody castles in Utah available to photograph, so I turned to my Maya training from 3D Animation. Over the course of a Saturday afternoon I built this nifty little stage for my battle.

Once I had my setting, I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted my characters to be and what I wanted them to be doing. I'm fortunate enough to have several talented cosplayers for friends-- so calling on them for references, I dropped some pictures into the rendered scene and painted over them to simulate the correct lighting for a mockup of the final piece.

At this point, I brought my progress to one of my mentors, Ben Sowards. He was thrilled with the development that had gone into the piece, but wasn't convinced by the composition. So he gave me a few pointers and it was back to the drawing board. We re-shot references, and once I had everything I needed, I got started on the final illustration.

This is where it sits now. I like doing very detailed underpaintings before I move onto the final phase-- in my experience, it saves a lot of time fussing over color and value. If a piece looks good in black and white, it will look even better once I add color. So I'm going to work out as many details as I can, and hopefully I'll soon be able to report back with the finished illustration.