Illustration Master Class & James Gurney
So far my time at IMC has been great! I miss my wife and little girl, but my progress has been crazy!
In preparation for the event we were to come with a sketch based on our project. I chose the War-priest of Thune, a white Magic: The Gathering card featuring a war cleric being cool. I started with these concepts:
Concepts
After talking with my wife and a few friends I settled on the third concept and got to work. I shot some reference photos of my brother-in-law Marlo and I running around in football pads made to look like armor. I then did a lot of drawing. Here is the sketch I brought with me to IMC:
Initial Sketch for IMC
After several critiques and great demos from the teachers I revised the sketch over three days into the following:
Final Sketch
All said and done I am very excited about this drawing! Truth be told there is a part of me that cannot believe I drew it! 😉
It’s been an amazing ride! Boris Vallejo came by and helped me get the angle right on the mace. Rebecca Guay stopped by to give me tips on make the face more emotive. Donato Giancola sat down with me and helped me work out the cool flowing cape. Greg Manchess helped me work out the clusters of soldiers running behind the war-priest. Scott Fisher came by toward the end to work out the final composition elements. Dan DosSantos encouraged me to make the mace more weathered. But to top it all Jeremy Jarvis, Art Director for Magic the Gathering, has stayed by me every step of the way, encouraging me not to give up or “wimp out” on any detail of the piece. I want to thank all of these great artists for their help!
In addition I was featured in James Gurney’s blog! He was very interested in my reference photos of me and my brother in law running around in make shift armor with swords! How cool!!!
An Artist's Journey 
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Just stumbled on this from a google image search of some of Greg Manchess’ work. Had to comment! That’s a really nice drawing – well done man. Crazy to see the difference after all the critiques.