Call of Cthulhu: Silver Twilight Lodge (part 1)

Late last week I received permission to start sharing recently released work, so expect lots of new work to be appearing on the blog in the coming weeks!

First up, I have a piece I did for the Call of Cthulhu: Silver Twilight Lodge expansion, the Faceless Abductor (imagine that, a monster!). This is one of two cards I created for this expansion and this is the first time I have worked on the Call of Cthulhu franchise. Hard to believe I did these practically a year ago now. The assignment was easy, depict a Nightgaunt with no face hanging out in the shadows of a cave, here is what I came up with...

Faceless Abductor
(How can he say 'RAWR' without a mouth??)
© 2011 Fantasy Flight Games

This expansion has been out for a little while and I have yet to see the cards in person. I was able to find a scan of the card on a fan site that gives me some idea of how it turned out. Looking forward to finally holding my contribution to the Cthulhu mythos in my hands.

Faceless Abductor
(now on a piece of card stock for your convenience)
© 2011 Fantasy Flight Games

Here is the drawing that went into the piece. As with other projects I have shared with you here on the blog, I started with several very loose thumbnails before moving onto a more finished drawing and eventually the final painting. You might notice a couple of things that ended up changing from the sketch to the final piece...

Faceless Abductor
(now on a piece of paper in pencil for your convenience)
© 2011 Fantasy Flight Games

First off, the final piece ended up flipped horizontally. When working on a piece I always flip it to get a fresh look at it, sometimes I realize it is just better off to stay flipped. The second change, and the one that means more to me, is that the rocks in the background went from looking like formless drippy blobs to looking more like actual underground rock formations. As I talked about at the beginning of the year I spent a lot of time last year trying to break old bad habits and use more reference. In the drawing I was making marks of what I thought rocks were like and when it came to the painting I was faced with big formless masses of drippy garbage. I stopped myself again from going down the bad habit highway, got a bunch of good rock reference and got back to work with a better understanding of what these forms needed to look like. They might be just rocks in the background, but they deserve the same attention that the monster gets or the whole thing will fall apart.

That is all for today, see you back here on Wednesday for something with TENTACLES! Until then...

For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com