LoTR Battle of Lake-Town

For most of my life when I thought of dragons I would instantly think of Smaug. Smaug the Horrible, Smaug the Terrible, Smaug the MIGHTY! The Hobbit is a favorite of mine and I have read it several times over the years.  So when I was approached by Fantasy Flight Games to design Smaug for them and to do a series of paintings I jumped at the opportunity. When I was approached a second time to do even more paintings of Smaug, I jumped at those too! We are going to talk about the second round of Smaugs today...

If you follow the blog regularly you may have noticed from my reports from Gen Con that FFG put together a special set of LoTR cards for Gen Con 2012 and the set turned out to be the Battle of Laketown. They needed several hero pieces for Smaug and was happy to paint some more images of the big bad dragon. We were looking at a very tight turnaround for these, I was implementing a new technique on building up my paintings, and I was getting over being super sick at the Illustration Master Class... so it was a perfect storm for me to fall on my face or to do something that did not involve me falling on my face... This is what I came up with...

The Burning of Lake-Town #1 (Smaug the Terrible)

© 2012 Fantasy Flight Games

 The Burning of Lake-Town #2 (Smaug the Magnificent)

© 2012 Fantasy Flight Games

 The Burning of Lake-Town #3 (Smaug the Mighty)

© 2012 Fantasy Flight Games

I am really happy with how they turned out, and I am pretty sure so are the folks at FFG. I made them nice and big for me and made sure everything was where it needed to be for them. I learned a lot with these to say the least. The new technique has opened my eyes to some things and has allowed me the chance to better understand what I do as a painter. I will have a break down of the process for each of these in the near future. There will be more Smaug fun later in the year as well, but I can't say too much about that... yet. Here are some scans for the actual cards from the set so you can see how they got cropped for the game...

That is all for today, see you back here on Wednesday for some new Dungeons & Dragons work! Until then...

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