Psycho Cyber Reaper

Hey, I’ve found the coloured version of the reaper I posted last week.

Not the you were holding your breath, but as the saying goes, OP must deliver.
So here it is.

It wasn’t actually necessary to render it in, but as I said, I kind of fell in love with the whole thing, so I made this over the course of a couple of lunch breaks back at my last job.

To be fair, even if the corp is no more, I might still get a tattoo of this at some point.
If and when I get the chance.

by Paolo Puggioni

The Story of Timun Emas

I’ve recently started a very fruitful and enjoyable collaboration with Legends Myths and Whiskey, a podcast about, well, Legends, Myths and Whiskey!

Now, it’s not because I’m involved in it, but the podcasts are mightily interesting.
So if you are, like me, lucky enough to have a job that allows you listening to stuff without being distracted by it, I whole-heartedly recommend to subscribe, or at least to give it a try.

Just so you know, I’m not normally into podcasts (either I keep a documentary on the secondary monitor while I work, or just music), and the only two other podcasts I follow are StarTalk and There’s No Such Thing As A Fish.

So yeh, Legends, Myths and Whiskey is that good:)

LMAW produces three new podcasts every month, each with two new myths from around the world.
Between one story and another, as you might have figured, the host will talk about a specific brand of whiskey, which I think is a pretty cool thing to pair with ancient stories.

Anyway, I’ll be posting the illustrations as we go along with the podcasts, and this week’s was about an Indonesian legend about a girl called Timun Emas

To make a long story very short, there was a couple who couldn’t have children, so they thought the next best thing after fertility therapy was begging the giant monster Butho Ijo to help them with his magic powers (the illustration depicts the moment the supplicants make their case before the demon).

The monster agrees, but under the condition that the child would return to him once she’s grown up.

In an admirable display of “uh that might be a problem later on but I’ll do it anyway and think about it later”, the aspiring parents take the deal, go back home and after nine months their dream comes true.

They lead an uneventful but happy life with their offspring, until, many years later, the monster knocks at their door demanding they fulfill their part of the deal.

The two parents, quite ungentlemanly I have to say, manage to delay him for some time, lying shamelessly, until Buto Ijo can’t take their excuses any more and decides to run after the poor girl.

Luckily Timun Emas has been given some magic trinkets to defend herself, and after an adventurous escape though the forest, she manages to overcome the monster and get back to her parents, to live happily ever after.

The story teaches us that it’s morally acceptable to break a deal if your counterpart is a blood-thirsty monster.

You can find the story, properly narrated, here.

by Paolo Puggioni

Logos

If there’s one thing I hate, together with having my teeth drilled by the dentist, queuing at the post office and filling in tax forms, is doing logos.

As a matter of fact, not unlike most Illustrators of my generation, making logos was exactly how I started my career, in a small, now defunct advertising company in Northern Italy.
You know, just to “get a foot in the industry”.

Photoshop was a novelty back then, the Internet was at its beginnings, and every time there was some feedback we had to draw the thing back from scratch. I mean, with pencils, markers and paper.

No hold on, let me rephrase that: we had to draw the DAMN thing back from scratch.

And one thing I learned in my time in advertising, is that your clients would always require the highest possible amount of feedback, always.

So there I was , drawing over and over again something I had no interest whatsoever in, which eventually led to my deepest disgust towards anything even remotely related to logo-making.

It’s not that I don’t have respect in the profession. I know there’s an entire, huge set of skills involved in making a good logo.
It’s just that I probably didn’t have those skills, and I had no interest whatsoever in developing them.

It is with surprise then, that at some point, about a year ago, I heard myself slipping to my bunch of good Internet friends that I would be glad to redraw the logo of Grim Sleepers, our player Corporation in EVE Online.

It might have been because I had just finished watching Sons of Anarchy, and I kind of liked the aesthetics of bikers leather, or something like that.

The thing is, I actually enjoyed the entire process, and I’m kind of pleased with the results.

Ok, it’s not like I designed Nike’s logo or anything, and drawing a biker-style cyborg skull is a lot closer to what I do normally, but still.

There were more, but being them just slight variations of the logos above I’ll save you some band width.

There also was a coloured version of the one we picked, I just can’t find it on my machine right now.
I’ll ask one of my corpsies if they still have it.

Since then we all abandoned EVE to one degree or another, and when I came across these logos in my Old_Stuff folder I went all “awwww, look at that”.

I loved my corp.
I had also considered getting a new tat with the Grim Sleepers’ logo.
Oh well, good times.

by Paolo Puggioni

Just Weapons

In 2014 I worked a lot on the Pathfinder game setting; weapons, characters, environments, you name it.
I was also working on Game of Thrones back then, plus a bunch of other things, all this on top of my day job at Jagex.

In hindsight, yeh maybe I had too much on my plate at the same time.
Not enough to mess up deadlines, luckily (I’ve never ever been late on a deadline, actually!), but after several months of this, hell I was tired.
And to be completely honest with myself, I’m not 100% happy with all the artwork I produced during that time.

As a matter of fact, there are throngs of Illustrations I have from that period, and I’m comfortable with just a handful of them.
Oh well, experience, I guess.

Anyway, one of the expansions I worked on was Pathfinder’s Skull and Shackles.
These are some of the cards I made for it.

The rest of the work in that particular assignment falls under the “umm this might need some more love” category, whereas these weapons seemed to me good enough to post here.

I remember these flowed out quite nicely.
After all I was quite used to drawing one set of weapon after the other when I was on Runescape.

As for the rest, it appears I’m heading towards the end of this “empty the Old_Work folder” initiative.
After the very last couple of Concepts I made for Runescape, form now on it’s just new, unpublished work.

by Paolo Puggioni

Just Props

In the spirit of posting once and for all all the old stuff I found in my back-ups, here’s some more props left from my time at Jagex.

I know, I said I was done with Runescape posts. I was wrong.

Anyway.
My memory hasn’t improved recently, so once again I have no recollection of what particular quest these props were for.
Nomad’s Elegy maybe?

Hell I don’t even know if they made it into the game, as I made the concepts long before the project went into production, and I had already left by then.

Whatever the case, the brief for this was “an object that could be wielded as a weapon, could occasionally turn into a mirror, and looks ancient and powerful”.

So there, here’s what I came up with.

Ah, now that I think of it I was supposed to design a whole lot of characters too, but I had to move to another project soon after, namely, this one.
Which is why I have this one thing to show for the entire quest.

As for the rest, I just checked, and in fact I have two other concepts left to post from my time on Runescape, which I will post next time.
And then I’ll be done, PROMISE.

by Paolo Puggioni

Characters Concepts

I drew bunch of characters for the same project I posted a while ago.

Again, I won’t bother you with the details as that would take a few thousands words, and nobody ain’t got time for that.

In a nutshell, I was trying to imagine how characters from a game set in your usual post-apocalyptic scenario would look like. That is, without being your cliche post-apocalyptic-world villains.

To be honest my research started with what I HAD to stay away from.
For example, this or this or this.
The wastelands looter is kind of an established and iconic look, so thinking of something original wasn’t the easiest of tasks.

So, imagine that sort of environment, where civilization has ceased to exist, there are no infrastructures, no production facilities, no government.
Basically no other way to survive than scavenge what remained from the previous society and steal what others had managed to muster.

In short, a world where there is a very short life expectancy.

In terms of “fashion”, in an environment where death is such a likely event, (and being alive a source of pride on its own) I figured that:

– characters would like to wear the trophies of their past encounters. Like, you know, a don’t-fuck-with-me sign, but also as a form of showing such pride.

– they wouldn’t socialize with each other easily, preferring to keep at a distance before engaging with a stranger. That would probably entail a whole code of well-readable signs (tattoos? Body art?) for strangers to read.
Stuff like “I’m good at traps, I’m a trader, I’m groggy in the mornings, I can poison your family” and things like that.

– People would combine parts from all sort of objects into something completely different. So, a stove door into a face mask, old typewriter parts combined into a hat, etc.

– a whole lot of paraphernalia would be integral part of the character’s clothing. Carrying luggage around wouldn’t be the most practical of things in a dangerous situation, so all sort of tools-weapons-tradable items-food and whatnot would be somehow “embedded” in their clothes to be ready to use.

So, these were the first sketches.

I was kind of happy with the direction, so I drew a few portraits just to have a feel of the setting and establish a mood.

I meant them to look somehow devious, (with a hint of “kinky”?) without falling into the cliché’ of the wasteland thug who just kills you because that’s what they do.
Morals wouldn’t be a thing in such a setting, but I wanted it to be reflected in more subtle things than “I’m evil therefore I wear spikes and a Mohawk”.

Anyway, that’s where my research ended. I had a while lot of characters ideas in mind but I had to move on to other things, so this is pretty much the end of it.

Huge fun up to that point though.

by Paolo Puggioni

More Vampires

These are the last two concepts I had made for Runescape’s vampire quest, Lords of Vampyrium.

The one above is Drakan’s Throne room (the Big Baddy), on top of the castle.

We had pretty messed up ideas about this bunch of environments.

As I said before, I definitely wanted to avoid all the clichés about vampires, especially the Gothic architecture bit.

In this regard, this was helped by the fact that, in Runescape, vampires come from another dimension.

So, using a visual language that looked a bit alien would have made sense, and at the same time dodge the overused North European architecture entirely.

The throne room was supposed to be roofless, so that greater vampires could land and take off from it at will.

From the outside, the top of the tower would had looked as if surrounded by a moving black cloud of crawling figures.

I doubt my colleagues eventually had the time to squeeze that purely cosmetic animation into the game, but in our minds it would have looked cool.

The room also had only three walls, so that actually Drakan could dominate both the throne room and the city at his feet from his seat.

The walls were supposed to have alcoves carved all along their length, where important vampires could look down on supplicants from the shadows.

The big bunch of figures behind Drakan’s thrones were in fact paralysed humans kept alive though magic means, whose blood would fill the complicated designs on the floor and at the same time provide “refreshment” for the vampire’s boss.

In our view they would look like a complex of statues, moving ever so slightly, sometimes looking at the camera with desperate eyes, just kept alive for decoration (and I guess to make some kind of point).

I doubt Runescape engine would make it justice, but hey:)

The big hole in the middle was instead the Blood Pit, which was supposed to be used as a dump for Drakan’s victims and as a larder.

I’m not sure that actually made it into the game in that form, but the image below shows how we envisioned it during our brain storming.

Now that I think of it, I wonder how this level looked in Germany. You can’t show blood in German games, and damn, we filled the place with it.

Anyway, these were all the vampires I had.

I still have a bunch of small concepts I made sometimes last year (which I might post next week), and after that I guess I’ll have ran out of old Runescape stuff for good.

by Paolo Puggioni

Some Vampires

The last project I worked on at Jagex was The Lords of Vampyrium, the last part of a long standing saga set in the vampires’ city of Myreque.

In hindsight, that was actually quite peculiar for me.
The city of vampires was the first project I worked on when I joined the company (I think it was the 4th quest of the series back then), and wrapping up the story was the last thing I did.

As a matter of fact, I made the first concepts and mood studies, whereas my colleagues still there completed the rest of the details.

Working on the quest was quite entertaining, the design was just in its infancy by the time I started, so most of the ideas we got when drawing the environments made it into the story.

These are the first mood studies I made.

The last one was the winner.

As some of you might notice (I doubt it because he’s not a main-stream artist, but if you know him we’ll be instant buddies), the visual language heavily references the messed up aesthetics of Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński.

I remember it was my old AD Pascal Blanche’ who introduced me to his work some 6 years ago, and I had been immediately blown away by the nightmarish visions Beksiński managed to summon.

When it turned out I had to design a city that was a mix between a nightmare and a glimpse of hell, all those images popped up to the surface from the depth of my very inefficient memory, and all the rest fell into place quite easily.

What I really, really wanted to avoid was any cliché about vampires.

Gothic buildings, fancy clothes, black capes, you name it.

Vampires have been depicted in pretty much on every possible media in every possible way, so it’s not like it was an easy task.

This almost-alien, twisted and infernal view was quite new to me, so I think it worked pretty well.

I actually don’t know how it eventually turned out in game, the concepts were quite ambitious for what Runescape’s engine capabilities.

I guess I’ll dig up some Youtube videos now:)

by Paolo Puggioni

An Improbable Life

A few days ago An Improbable Life was published, which is a book that my family has been looking forward to seeing in a printed form for quite some time.

Firstly, it has been written by my father in law, who finally put together the memoirs of his many travels; secondly, my wife translated it into English; thirdly, I drew the cover.
Quite the family enterprise.

Now, as a matter of fact, this is a book I would whole-heartedly recommend buying.

My father in law has had an unbelievably eventful life, and apart from the “insider’s” pleasure of reading how certain fabled events actually unfolded, the narration is indeed a mightily entertaining one.

He travelled for work (as an explorer, prospector and more) to pretty much every corner of the planet.

I remember asking him once what countries he had seen, and after some thought he told me that “maybe it’s quicker if I tell you the handful I haven’t visited”.

The stories he could tell were so many that he couldn’t squeeze them in a single book, so he divided them in several volumes, of which this is just the first one.

The book starts from his early childhood and carries on until his early twenties, before he left Rome for Australia.

I won’t be reviewing the actual book, as I would be biased and reviews are not really my thing (and this is an art blog after all!).

However, this is the perfect place to post some of the sketches I made for the cover, and the landscape used for the final layout.

If you want to order the book, you can find it here.

Seriously, it’s a great read.

by Paolo Puggioni

An Old Concept

While migrating my data to my snazzy new Linux PC, I had to quickly do a complete backup before my Mac had drawn its last breath.

As it happens when I do this kind of things under pressure, lots of stuff which had been sitting on my hard drive got buried in one of the hastily put together New Folder, New Folder(1) etc.

Amongst those there are a few drawings that I made some time ago and never published; some sketches, some concepts I was allowed to take home when I left Jagex, some freelance work and so on.

Long story short, in the next few weeks I’ll post some of the kitchen sink material I had forgotten about, starting from now!

I’m not THAT sure that I can share the details of what this was made for, so to be on the safe side I just won’t.

Let’s just say it’s a concept that describes a mighty cataclysmic even that – alas –  no one will ever see.

As a matter of fact, this is probably the project I’ve been most excited about in the past few years (a part from Game of Thrones, duh).

Too bad it never made it into production, but at least I have bunch of artwork to remind me of those happy days.

by Paolo Puggioni