Bestiary Cover Process
Here’s something different. This will go public next week, but is exclusive to Art Tier Patrons first. Nice!
I was recently looking through my archives, and I stumbled across a bunch of preliminary work I’d made for the Dragon Warriors Bestiary cover. No one’s ever seen these, as far as I know, outside of myself and the then-publisher of Dragon Warriors, James Wallis.
When I get a cover commission there’s usually a written brief, or sometimes a discussion via email or on the phone/skype to talk about what’s needed.
I really enjoyed working with James - it was always a discussion - sometimes short if we were on the same page right away and no chat was required, other times we kicked the ideas ball around for some time until we hit on something we felt would work.
As I recall the cover for Dragon Warriors Bestiary was a medium length discussion. James really wanted a dragon to feature. The game is called “Dragon Warriors” after all - and the original edition in the 80s never showed a dragon on the covers.
In conversation we discovered we were both fascinated by Paulo Uccello’s painting of George and the Dragon. It’s really weird and gets under your skin. Here it is.
For some reason I then drew a version this dragon, perhaps to see if it could work. I think we concluded it was just too odd for a current RPG audience.
So then I did a bunch of other thumbnails, and I was kinda shocked how cool these were. It’s always weird looking back so far into the past. Your work is much easier to assess than when you’ve just done it. So here are the sketches I made.
This one didn't reach the same level of polish. Weirdly enough it looks a bit compositionally similar to a cover I'm making right now for Runequest!
I don't recall what this was going to be, but it's clearly an abandoned idea:
We went with the third one.
I then made some sketches of the dragon. This first one is way too “ordinary”. So I made one that includes some of the spirit of Uccello’s dragon, in being a bit less “vanilla dragon”.
And then this was incorporated into a final sketch. At this point I knew the light from the flame was the hook. And the characters started to get a life of their own. We get an impression of what they might do next, which gives the image a lot more life.
And here’s a video of the image being painted - it’s not a recording of the actual painting process - this one predates my ability to record that. So it's a series of snap shots put into a video:
At the head of this post is the final image. At the end of a cover painting I’ll always add in a couple of inches of “bleed” all around. This allows the cover extra flexibility when it’s laid out, and it comes in handy if the image is used for anything else.
So this image was first published as the cover to Dragon Warriors Bestiary. James Wallis was a forward-looking publisher and only bought First Rights, which meant I own the copyright to the image, which is great. It invested me in the image, and allows me to sell prints and other merchandise using the image. And it’s nice to own something from my body of work. Almost everything I’ve made is owned by other people, so thank you James!
You can get the Dragon Warriors Bestiary from Serpent King Games here: https://serpentking.com
And speaking of merch, you can get this image on art prints, stickers, phone cases and all kinds of stuff here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/jonnyhodgsonart/works/9970865-dragon-warriors-bestiary?c=190990-dragon-warriors