Air, Dust, and Earth Mephits - Prcoess

Back in March I shared with you the nine Mephits that I designed and illustrated for Dragon magazine issue #421. Since there are nine of them I am going to slit them up and share the process that went into making them through out this week. Today I have for you Air, Dust, and Earth Mephits. As a reminder, here is how the final illustrations turned out...

Air, Dust, and Earth Mephits

© 2013 Wizards of the Coast

I was given very simple open ended descriptions for all of these which allowed me a lot of room explore my take on the Mephits. I tried to give a range of cautious to a little wacky on all of these to see what the art department was looking for.

Before I began to work on any of the Mephits I did a photo shot with both myself and my wife in front of the camera. I wanted to work out some poses that I planned to use and to see what else happened while I moved around in an open space thinking about each of the different kinds of Mephits. I recommend doing this! Not only does it produce the unexpected, it helps you get physically into your subject matter and generates a bunch of reference that you can use for the assignment and hopefully on other projects.

Once the photos were taken and sorted I got to work on thumbnails for all of the Mephits...

Air Mephit - Thumbnails

© 2013 Wizards of the Coast

  Dust Mephit - Thumbnails

© 2013 Wizards of the Coast

  Earth Mephit - Thumbnails

© 2013 Wizards of the Coast

"A" was always a 'safe' concept and by "C" I was trying to push things to see what works and does not work. For each of these "A" was the winner. I would have really liked to work on "C" of the Air Mephit... but that is how it goes. Once I had approved thumbnails I moved forward on the final drawings.

Air Mephit - Drawing

© 2013 Wizards of the Coast

Dust Mephit - Drawing

© 2013 Wizards of the Coast

 

Earth Mephit - Drawing

© 2013 Wizards of the Coast

There were a LOT of transparent and translucent Mephits. I think this is the most transparent and translucent monsters that I have even created and they were all in once assignment. Most of my monsters tend to me a little more... solid. All of the drawings were approved and I moved onto the finals. Since there are so many Mephits I chose one of each set of three to share the process progression. The winner from this set is the Earth Mephit...

Earth Mephit - Process preogression

© 2013 Wizards of the Coast

In just eight easy steps you to can have your very own Earth Mephit... or not. Of the three, this one took the most time to complete. The Dust Mephit seemed to be done before I even began it. There were some very different completion times for these illustrations. Which is to be expected with this many different materials and capacities.

That is all for another exciting Monday, see you back here on Wednesday for another three Mephits! Until then...

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