My Coloring Book - on Kickstarter!

During the last 3,5 years (how time flies!) in my very limited free time I was preparing a quite fun personal project. And now it's theoretically finished (hip, hip, hooray!).

So, what's this project about? It's a coloring book with diverse hand-drawn vintage sceneries. 

I know, it sounds like a quick and easy project. You could build a house, plant a tree and raise a kid during this time. But hey, I might have put some significant effort into these drawings (have I mentioned that my spare time was very limited?). And if I only knew... making the drawings was just the beginning! 

Another time-consuming task was finding a proper printing house which would be able to print "Vintage Sceneries" according to my highly non-standard requirements. The crucial aspect was thick, high quality paper which would work for watercolors, felt pens and crayons. For some reason, only a few printing houses are able to do that! I hate to be fussy, but a lot of different paper types were tested in order to find the right one. 

Not-so-crucial, but still important issues were perforations enabling removing sheets, aesthetic binding and a cherry on a top - gold and shiny frame on a cover. 

Then I had to do some math in order to determine the campaign rewards. And check it... twice.

And finally, preparing the campaign itself. Only time will tell whether I did it correctly... 

The campaign will last for 30 days. 

Rewards will consist of pdf versions, printed books, printed books with one page colored by my humble person and original ink drawings.  

Below there is a sneak-peak of "Vintage Sceneries":

I don't want to reveal too much at the moment, but there are Victorian houses, gothic graves, mysterious forest huts, medieval fantasy buildings and even a ghost sheep.

Wish me luck! I hope that you'll check out the campaign sometime :) 

If it sounds interesting, check the campaign yourself :)

TOP 3 illustrations (dark and fantastical)

I have some serious doubts whether people still bother reading something as old-school as blog posts. However, I prepared a new post, just a short one. 

Not so long ago I made 24 illustrations for an upcoming fantasy card game (yay!). Nevertheless, currently I can show only 3 of them (not-so-yay). 

After long deliberations  the TOP 3 was finally chosen! Ladies and gentlemen, please let me announce: 

#3 “Infiltrate”  

Simply because most of my illustrations present only buildings. And this one looks quite mysterious (I hope).

#2 “Tsunami”  

 A combination of classic “grimdream” medieval architecture and dramatic/time-consuming waves. 

#1 “Lord of the Void” 

Because dark surrealism is my favorite genre... is there such genre as “dark surrealism”? Anyway, the color combination is nice.

Concept Designs - Tabletop Miniatures

"I don't dislike to be alone"

Ingmar Bergman

What would you do, if you had plenty of spare time and wouldn’t have to worry too much about economic issues? Well, most of the people would like to travel the world and spend time with their friends (which is not such a bad idea), but I would love to create my own, miniature cities and other fantasy sceneries like those from tabletop RPG games. Okay, maybe I would also travel here and there...

True, I don’t have time for creating physical models, painting them and building fantasy lands of them, but lately, I had (again!) an opportunity to work on concept designs for a company producing such 3D models. Their Kickstarter campaign has just ended and, considering how successful it was, I can guess, that there are quite a lot people interested in spending hours and days on building their miniature worlds and probably even fight battles there. The only difference is, that they actually HAVE time for that 😊

To the point! My task was to design ships, a little bizarre harbor city buildings, and various scenery objects for “lost tribes”. Below you can see, among others, a boathouse, a navigator’s guild, a port tavern, a governor’s mansion, a wizard’s tower, a shaman’s hut and tribal tree houses.

 I hope that all the backers will have fun with these sceneries!

Swamp Fortress

We are moving forward with exploring medieval fantasy architecture. After simple wooden huts and decaying townhouses, it’s time for a larger building - a castle in the middle of wetlands.

1.      In the case of fantasy objects, imagination is crucial, so…

Yes, that’s the fruit of my imagination. If you saw some of my previous posts, you’ve probably noticed, that thumbnail concept sketches made for my own projects are barely legible and they rarely foretell success in further works on a drawing. Let’s see what will happen this time!

2.      A really fast sketch on a large paper which will develop in a finished, detailed drawing

3.      More cautious drawing with ink

4.      Details

5.      Adding materials and shading. A few hours of adding materials and shading, actually. There is also a place for a mysterious creature from the thumbnail sketch, hurray!

This could be a finished drawing, but, in fact, I added watercolors to it. You can take a look at a short video, to see the results.

If you would like to know how to design imaginary buildings, like this one, you can watch my Skillshare course. I’m talking here about using more or less fantastical building materials, creating feasible structures, but also telling how life in various types of buildings could look like and how their function would influence their look. And of course, I couldn’t ignore my favorite subject: The Frequently Made Mistakes 😊

BLIGHTINGALES - music album illustrations

Based on my long and insightful researches (i.e. checking “likes” on Facebook and Behance and posting a one-question questionnaire on DeviantArt) I discovered, that my viewers/readers are most interested in my gothic illustrations.

Oddly enough, I don’t have too many opportunities to make such artworks. But today I can finally share with you a mysterious, ruined gothic cathedral painted as a cover illustration for a grey-metal (doom-death-symphonic black) band “Darken My Grief”.

So far I could only listen to a few demo fragments, but I hope I managed to capture an appropriate atmosphere. Luckily the band’s frontman – Duddu had quite a clear vision regarding the whole graphic design.  Considering this, the task may sound like a piece of cake, but in practice, it meant seemingly endless editions of the whole mass of tiny little elements. Apparently, that’s what happens, when two perfectionists meet. Anyway, the final result was worth the effort!

One of my ugly concept sketches – let’s call this phase “a necessary pain”. Probably at this stage the clients are seriously wondering whether they made the right choice when hiring me:

The final illustration – I had almost a total freedom here. The only requirement was to capture a woman and a flock of birds. So I decided to put them in a gothic environment (with cathedral’s ruins in a shade of whitened bones. Charming, I know):

The front cover design:

The back cover illustration (probably you can notice letters DMG hidden in the central symbol resembling an angel – this symbol is actually frontman’s brilliant idea):

Some of the lyrics backgrounds:

And now I’m waiting impatiently to listen to their music...