During our Kickstarter campaign, one generous art lover pledged for the Deluxe Art Pack, which included all the DEER LORD games, poster, T-shirt, and original artwork. Let’s see if we can agree she got exactly what she deserves (in all the right ways)
the artwork!
size A1, pastel, pencil, silver ink on black
For this special occasion, the Deer Lord shed his usual tuxedo and slipped into something more comfortable, his ceremonial vestments. He’s emerging through a rift in the cosmos as if to ask ‘anybody wanna playeth a game?’
It took a couple of experiments to get it right, but I did find a way to trace a digital print onto the black card stock paper, placing the print on top and almost etching the lines with a lead pencil. Layers of mixed pastels for the Lord and shadows, coloured pencil for the nebulas. I traced the lines with silver ink and weathered them down with pencil and eraser. The silver in the stars makes them truly shine.
If you’ve heard good things about something called The Starry Night, this is it.
Because of the silver and the shine of oily pastels on the matte background, the look of the artwork changes with the lighting. A nice effect that my camera can’t really do justice, but here I am trying anyway:
The cosmic setting really asked for some splashes of colour. I mostly stuck to greens, blues, and purples for the vestments but the galactic backdrop has reds, yellow, a number of shades of grey. Somewhat refreshing to use colour after thinking monochrome for so long.
I had a lot of fun creating the artwork and it pushed me to use new techniques that really payed off in the end. Let’s hope our generous patron finds it every bit as beautiful as she had hoped. This one’s for you, Wendy!
Because I’m so pleased about the way the stars turned out, I’m thinking of doing a little tutorial. Let us know if you’d like to see that sort of thing!