John Carter of Mars

I’ve recently made some artwork for Modiphius’ latest RPG, John Carter of Mars – Adventures on The Dying World of Barsoom, and since it has been already displayed on the company’s website, for once I won’t have to wait a couple of years to post it.

The Kickstarter campaign has gone live last Tuesday, and the goal was reached in a matter of minutes, which is beyond impressive.

Now, I have to confess that I was particularly happy to work on this project.
When I was a kid there was an awesome books market in my home town, where you could drop your used books and pick up new ones, pretty much by weight.
I used to go there with my dad – whose only activity while not working was pretty much just reading – and grab a bagful of new (well, used) books every Saturday morning.

It was pretty much the golden age of SciFi in Italy back then, with the Urania magazine being one of the best selling publications.
It’s thanks to that that I started reading the classics of Sci-fi and Fantasy, Arthur Clarke, Azimov, H.G.Wells and so on. Not to mention Conan, Captain Future, Flash Gordon and, of course, John Carter of Mars.
Hell, one of the first things I remember drawing is one of the covers by Frank Frazetta. I’d like to go back in time and tell 10yo me that all that copying was not for nothing.

Anyway, the illustration below is the first one I’ve made for the game, and it depicts Deja Thoris, one of the main characters, looking over the vast city of Ptarth.

Since I’ve started being diligent with backing up my stuff, I’ve also kept the sketches this time.

After the first couple of iterations, the art directors came to the conclusion that we needed a clearer idea of the visual language for ships and architecture. So I actually stopped working on this illustration for a while and draw a whole bunch of concepts for buildings and spaceships before I could move to the coloured version.

Actually I’ll ask them if I’m allowed to post them, eventually.

Anyway, John Carter of Mars looks awesome (look at the video!) and I hope I’ll be making more work for it.
Next time I’ll post more of what I’ve done so far.

by Paolo Puggioni

Some of My Stuff on Netflix

In the past few days I received a few emails by people asking me if I was aware of the usage that was being made of some of my artwork.

As it turns out I was, as a few months ago I was asked by 3DD Productions to licence some of my works for their documentary Myths and Monsters, airing right now on Netflix and directed by Daniel Kontur.

The artwork above is not mine, by the way. He’s by my friend and former colleague John McCambridge, whose artwork is also displayed on the show:).

If I remember correctly the show is available only on Netflix US and UK, in which case one of the links above will not work if you don’t live there (or you don’t have a VPN).

So, if you are eaten by curiosity, you can have a peek at it on 3DD productions’ website first, and then watch the trailer below, where some of the artwork is already displayed in all its humble glory.

An unforeseen consequence of this is that now I have credits as a Concept Artist on IMDB, woo hoo!
Here you can instead read the list of all the other artists who worked on the project.

Anyway, I haven’t had the time to watch it all yet, but it does look really nice and it’s now in my Netflix list.

Oh, thanks to all of those who wrote to me asking if I knew about it, it was actually really nice of you.

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones – Valar Dohaeris

As I said in my last post, The Archmaester’s Key, Game of Thrones last chapter pack by Fantasy Flight Games, has recently been released on FFG’s store, and I had the pleasure of illustrating Valar Dohaeris, one of the cards of this expansion.

As the name suggests (if you are a Game of Thrones’ nerd as I am), the illustration is set in Braavos, and it depicts the Temple of The House of Black and White, which is where Arya Stark spends a considerable amount of time both in the books and in the HBO’s series.

I have to say, the chapters about Arya were among my favourites while reading the series, so working on this was even more enjoyable to me.

In case anyone’s memories were fuzzy about this place, I happen to have the relevant bits handy, straight from my brief:)

Slowly her eyes adjusted. The temple seemed much larger within than it had without. The septs of Westeros were seven-sided, with seven altars for the seven gods, but here there were more gods than seven.
Statues of them stood along the walls, massive and threatening. Around their feet red candles flickered, as dim as distant stars. The nearest was a marble woman twelve feet tall. Real tears were trickling from her eyes, to fill the bowl she cradled in her arms. Beyond her was a man with a lion’s head seated on a throne, carved of ebony. On the other side of the doors, a huge horse of bronze and iron reared up on two great legs. Farther on she could make out a great stone face, a pale infant with a sword, a shaggy black goat the size of an aurochs, a hooded man leaning on a staff. The rest were only looming shapes to her, half-seen through the gloom.

In the center of the temple she found the water she had heard; a pool ten feet across, black as ink and lit by dim red candles.

I don’t really remember if I decided to make the pool larger than ten feet as an artistic licence, or just because as an European I only speak Metric.
Regardless, it was supposed to be the focus of the composition, so it is indeed slightly larger than it’s described in the books.

I’m saying this just in case you are a Game of Thrones fundamentalist and you feel compelled to point this out to me in angry emails:)

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones – The Archmaester’s key

About a year after I’ve worked on it, The Archmaester’s Key Game of Thrones chapter pack has finally been released, and as it always happens Fantasy Flight Games was so kind to send me a copy of the printed cards.

I’m quite chuffed that the illustration I made for this chapter pack was also on FFG’s store product page🙂

Working on games for so long means that I should be used to seeing my work being published ages after it’s been delivered.
Yet, so much stuff has been going on since then that I almost struggled to remember what this chapter pack was about.

Reading the old briefs I remembered this was the last job I did with FFG Art Director Deb Freytag (who left the company soon after), with whom I had some really pleasant work relationship over the years.

I also realized that I’m an idiot, as I think I lost the original file for the only piece of art I made for this Game of Thrones project, so I’ll be able to post just the lower res one.

On the good side, this realization (that I lost files a few months ago, not that I’m an idiot), eventually led me to the good practice of running multiple, automatic, redundant back-ups, so losing artwork will hopefully be a thing of the past.

More Game of Thrones art next time.

by Paolo Puggioni

Home at Last

I have the feeling that the tl;dr version of my blog posts for the past year or so had been “damn I’ve been so busy, I haven’t posted anything for weeks, here’s some artwork by the way”.

As a matter of fact, I have indeed busy beyond description, but for once I have the time to tell you why.

After a year or so of build-up, discussions, preparation, planning, problem solving and whatnot, my family and I have moved back to Italy.
I am now officially a freelance Concept Artist.

If anyone is wondering if it’s scary, stop wondering: it is.

No salary at the end of the month, bills to manage and stuff like that. God it’s scary.

Luckily, part of the reason why I had been busy for the months leading to this, is that I had already started accepting freelance work on top of my day job, so I have a nice backlog of things to work on.

If anyone is wondering if it’s still scary, stop wondering: it is.
On the other hand, we moved to a pretty damn cool place, and the fact that my wife and I take our lunch breaks on the beach kind of mitigates the hassles of the freelance life a little bit.

If anyone is wondering, we live here now:

Moving to another country is a monumental endeavor, especially if you’re moving with a large dog and two cats, and you’re building another career on top of it.
Hence the long radio silence.

On the other hand, there’s quite a bunch of artwork in my hard drive that I haven’t had the time to post before, so you’ll see some actual pictures in the days to come.

by Paolo Puggioni

Freak Show First Panel

After several months of concepts, experiments and preparation for our comic Freak Show, I’ve finally started working on the actual panels.

And by started I mean, good Lord this is a lot more time consuming than I had imagined, I’ve been at it for weeks!
Obviously I haven’t spent weeks just on this very panel (I’m almost finished with page 1), and surely this has been on top of my day job, and on top of my freelance work, and on top of another huge thing going on I’ll talk about in a while.
But it is nonetheless quite a big endeavour.

So yes, I might have lost track of time, as I have started inking page 1 by the end of March, and I’m just about to finish with the rendering.
But I hope it’s just because the image below is a big vista with thousands of small details and it took about 70% of the overall time I spent on the page. Hopefully the next ones should go on faster.

So, I had meant to keep the panels to ourselves until they were finished, but I wouldn’t mind to hear some opinions before I go even further.

So there you go, Freak Show first panel (click to enlarge).

I’m still unsure about the position of the captions, and there are still some tweakes needed here and there.
But it’s pretty much there.

Below is instead the inked page without colours.
With the black on white you can really see the amount of work that went into it.

Anyway, as I said, critics are welcome.

If you want to have a look at the concepts I’ve made for Freak Show characters (and space ships) so far, here’s a bunch of links, neatly ordered by time:

Zaquida

Thrannak

Generic Characters

Zaquida Finals

Thrannak Finals

Chayne

Transport N945

by Paolo Puggioni

Cold Engines

Cold Engines is part of a set of illustrations I made for Horizon Games back in March.
The game is called Traveller, and after a successful Kickstarter campaign it’s estimated to be delivered in July 2017.

Working on the project has been huge fun, although, as it always happens, when I get commissions I get them all at the same time (most of which I won’t be able to share for a long time), and I now remember March as a blur of drawings, concepts, and nights spent on my Cintiq working while Watching Netflix on my secondary monitor.
Still, as I said, I had great fun with this, and the people I worked with were great.

I’m quite happy about this illustration in particular, as I had never drawn an Asian face before, oddly enough, and I think it ended up being not so bad.
I also think the perspective and the lines of the cockpit worked nicely together, so all in all this time I’m not complaining about the result when I look at it a month after it has been completed.
(Note to self, those kind of reds DO NOT translate well in CMYK!).

Only bump along the road was about me being a dumb idiot, and delivering the illustration with a screen reading ENGINE NON-REPONSIVE.
I still don’t know how I managed to mess that up.
Oh well.

Anyway, there are a few more illustrations I made for the project, which I’ll post in the coming days.

by Paolo Puggioni

Freak Show – Transport N945

Despite various delays due to other pressing work, the development of Freak Show is proceeding steadily, and after months of preparation and concept art I’ve finally started working on the actual panels.

I’m not sure we’ll share the whole panels before the comic has evolved into a more final form (or maybe yes? Note to self: talk to John).
In the meantime, in order to remain immersed in its universe, I’m also devoting my lunchbreak doodling sessions to Freak Show related subjects.

Since I had already designed one of the main ships in Zbrush as a reference for the comic, I used the mesh as a base for a quick mood study.
By quick I mean that I really really meant it to be quick, and then it turned out being a couple of weeks worth of luch breaks.

Anyway, here it is, N945 in all its glory.

I’m not spoiling the very first page by describing what this ship stands for or what it does, obviously.
I’ll just say that I spent quite some time figuring out what most of the various bits and pieces on its hull were for. So, what looks like random “tech stuff” visual noise should actually have a place in the Freak Show made-up technology.

I would have liked to post a turn-table animation of the 3D mesh, but for reasons I – and the several internet people I asked for help – couldn’t understand, the view in ZBrush was locked into some weird drawing angle setting, and the resulting animation would have looked very bad.

As an alternative, here are some occlusions renders made in Blender and Luxrender.
Good old Linux to the rescue.

As you might have noticed, the last one is the shot I painted over for the illustration, which as always was made with Krita.

Over the past few weeks I’ll be able to dedicate a lot more time to Freak Show, so I’ll be posting more of these soon.

by Paolo Puggioni

Freak Show – Chayne

Chayne is the only pure human among the main characters of Freak Show.
He is an activist who fights for trans-humans’ rights, so for a time I had considered making him like some stereotipical, cartoony “I go to all the protests and I don’t eat food which had a face” kind of person.
Then I decided against it.

This is the first page I made, a while ago.

I had no strong feelings towards any of them, so John picked up the youngest one.
I think his genuine look is fitting for an idealist, and I’m quite happy with the veil of innocence and ingenuity in his face.

Once we agreed on a general look, I made some full figure studies.
His clothes are consistent with the look I devised for the generic population, with the only difference that Chayne wouldn’t wear any head gear.

In purists worlds people would normally cover their head as a sign of modesty, and as a rebel I figure Chayne would not want to conform to that idea.

Also, I have to confess that I didn’t fancy one of the main characters to be wearing a hat that would make him look like the modern equivalent of a medieval farmer.
Anyway, here are some studies for Chayne.

We picked the first from the left, but don’t mind his face.
I made a few more experiments on this round of sketches, but his official look is still that of the young guy from page one.

Now I’m *this close* (makes gesture with thumb and index drawing close) to starting with the panels.
I just need to finalize a secondary character and some security guards, then I’m ready to go.

So you’ll be seeing a few more concepts over the next days.

by Paolo Puggioni

Freak Show – Thrannak #2

Here some more concepts for Thrannak, another one of the main characters in Freak Show.

Thrannak is a trans-human, and as opposed to Zaquida, she comes from a trans-humanist planet.
I haven’t designed anything of the visual style of the trans-human society yet, but I know that, where Purists are severe, modest and sober, trans-humans would make a point of affirming their own individuality, so I’d expect a more eclectic visual language.

For the Purusts I used mostly straight lines, sharp angles and dark and desaturated colours, so it makes sense that, by contrast, trans-humans’ aesthetic will be more organic and based on elegant curves.

We won’t show trans-humans environments until later on in the story, so I think this is enough for now.

As far as Thrannak goes, some elements of her home world is already hinted at in her outlook.
First of all, she is obviously a “modified human”. The scars (or seams) on her body serve as some sort of “war paint”, as well as having the function of hiding all the gear implanted under her skin.

Contrarily to Purists, who seldom indulge in frivolities, she is wearing piercings and an extravagant hairdo.
Also, well, her skin is green.

I meant her to have a very masculine build, and I think that is already working.
I did take some male body builders as a reference, and changed a bit hip size, lats and neck.

In the first version she also had some marks on her face, but John rightly pointed out that it could be confusing when next to Zaquida, so I removed them in this iteration.

With this I’m getting close to having enough material to start working on the panels.
Some of it is already done, just waiting to be posted here.

Just some polishing on a space ship, a couple of characters and we’re good to go.

by Paolo Puggioni