Friday, November 18, 2011

Compendium Artwork Update

The Lands of Ara Compendium 2011, described here as "collected highlights of the gaming content from the Lands of Ara blog from its inception in 2009 until the end of 2011, to be released as a free, downloadable pdf in the first weeks of 2012," is slowly starting to come together.

In that same post I mentioned that killer OSR artist Kelvin Green was working on new illos for the Compendium, and indeed he has recently delivered these! So here is a teaser of what is to come, in the form of Kelvin's awesome depiction of an Undead Yeti:


And speaking of killer OSR artists, we have commissioned the Compendium's front cover illustration from Johnathan Bingham. As Johnathan recently wrote, he is well into the initial sketching phase already, and once he has worked his magic, his wife Daisey will be colorizing the cover image for us! No preview yet, but I can tell you I'm very excited about this piece, as well as a number of other GREAT Kelvin Green pics I am keeping secret until the release of the Compendium.

4 comments:

  1. I have the privilege of seeing the commission art ahead of the compendium, and I've got to say seeing Kelvin's finished works and the early sketches of Bingham's cover make me really happy. I can't articulate what I want to say about how awesome these guys are, except to say that 1) they're real pros to work with; and 2) they're into what's going on in the composition. To me it feels like they're having fun, getting into the world or the session even though they weren't there. Maybe I'm romanticizing the art-monetization transaction, but my 10-year-old-not-able-to- draw-anything self screams "Fuck yeah! D&D!!!! So AWESOME!!!
    D&D&D&D&D&D&D&D!!!!!!
    AAAAGAGHHAGGHH!!!"

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  2. Really looking forward to seeing the finished work. Can you give us an idea of the page count and a table of contents at this stage?

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  3. Wow, great question Peter. I could probably get a TENTATIVE TOC posted within the week -- so far it's a loose list that my Editor-in-Chief (Spawn of Endra) hasn't yet vetted. But I will post a list of the likely Compendium contents as soon as I can.

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