Rhianna claims this is “embarrassingly bad”, but it is just a quick and dirty sketch for what our idea was.  We trusted Cristiano with the final vision.  Together, these two make a wonderful team.  As you can see, the idea for this page was to have baby Gaston painting a picture of his friends in the distance.  Rhianna put something together that Cristiano could certainly understand and build from.

In the lineart layer of the project, Cristiano shows us what we’re going to be able to expect before the end of the project, before colors are layered on.  This page is one of the first ones that we used where you can see some of the other characters that join Gaston in his book.  It’s very likely that these characters will be the ones that headline the other children’s books as well, with this group of four often hanging out with one another.

The coat of paint really brings things to life in some interesting ways.  We went this color palette because it exudes a lot of charm, and moves in line with the rest of the book.  Now, this isn’t really the last image you’re seeing here, as we had to make some tweaks here and there, but it’s pretty darn close to the end of what we had Cristiano do for us.

We are super excited to bring this children’s book to life, and we’re hoping that by the time we get to Philcon next month, we have at the very least a sample to show off.  We’ll see if we can pull that off, but in the meantime, cross your fingers for us, and hope that we can show you more soon!

The post Children’s Book Sketch to Life – How to be a Wizard appeared first on Tellest.

As cool as slimes and serpents and mummies are, there was something adorable and unique about this baby sapphire golem.  From its portly appearance to its spiky quartz deposits, it just looks so very different from all the other characters.  The lineart barely does the character justice, because Cristiano used such vibrant colors and shading to really make the little guy pop.

It’s fitting that the last character we worked on required some extra TLC.  If you’ll recall, we had to make some changes to the slime once upon a time, and we also decided there was at least one adjustment we needed here.  Specifically, we wanted to clean up the glowing color on the golem.  Since everything was one uniform color, and the golem’s eyes, chest and the crack on its belly glow, it almost looked like a face.

There may have been a little bit lost in translation when we described our concerns to Cristiano, because we ended up losing the purple and were left with a lot of blue…

But after that, we did a combo of the two, making it look a little less like a uniform face.  The purple eyes make a little more sense, leaving it look more sentient.

So, after months of QQ art, we’ve finally come to the end of this little set.  Cristiano did a lovely job with our four monster ambassadors, but that doesn’t even scratch the tip of the iceberg as far as what we have to show off for Merge Dungeon.  In fact, we still have so much to show off that next week we’re starting a new series that shows off the actual art from the Merge Dungeon game.  Keep your eyes peeled!

And hey, who knows… maybe some day we’ll see more Merge Dungeon babies…

The post Character Art – Baby Golem appeared first on Tellest.

The baby mummy was another really easy process to work through.  Cristiano knew exactly what he was working toward, and it turned out spectacular from the very first sketch onward.  Even in the game the mummies are kind of cutesy, but Cristiano instilled so much character into this little guy that it’s hard not to think about using him in other projects.

Once a fresh coat of paint was in place, we could see just how much character was there.  From the textured look to the wrappings, to the beautiful headdress of this baby pharaoh, everything just pops.  The lineart puts things in place, but the color lets it shine.

Cristiano made a few other changes even after we finished working on the mummy.  There’s a lot more fidelity to the character, and he can stand up with the rest of the characters we’ve shown off so far with ease.  The mummy definitely has a lot of personality, and we’re glad we got to collaborate on it.  We’ve got one more character in the quartet to show off, so we’ll see you in a few weeks for that!

The post Character Art – Baby Mummy appeared first on Tellest.

As you can see up there, we have a big assortment of sketches that Cristiano put together for us.  Ultimately, we ended up going with the tried and true first version, although I was so prepared to do the spiky version (#2) that you see up there.  Ultimately, we wanted the first baby we worked on to be extra cute though.

We experimented with a few colors too.  The character doesn’t quite look like any of the actual slimes that we saw in the Merge Dungeon game, but that’s okay.  This was for a different piece altogether, and we thought it was a cute idea.  Now, as for Blue up there, we thought he looked a little too much like a sponge (or the moon), so we switched things up a bit.

Ultimately, we decided to keep the slime green, since the green slimes are the first one you end up with in the game.  We’ve talked internally about maybe giving this character a kind of promotion and making a game all about him!

Here you go.  This is our final look at Baby Slime.  In keeping with the typical way we do things, there are three more Baby characters coming your way soon.  Keep your eyes peeled.  Hope you liked this character!

The post Character Art – Baby Slime appeared first on Tellest.

It’s not a dead project—it’s just on hold.

And now you can get a glimpse of concept art that Cristiano Reina put together for us.

It all started with a sketch.  The first choice that Declan has to make in the story is whether to pick up a magical sword, or a magical staff.  It shouldn’t be too surprising which one he went after.  But the sketch gave us some choices for how to figure out what he would be able to pick between.

After we selected the sketch we wanted to move forward with, Cristiano set to work, doing an awesome job of giving Declan’s potential equipment a lot of pop.

Shortly after that, he cleaned things up and gave the staff (which Declan would ultimately choose) a bit more personality.

After that came the first splash of color.  Here you can see that even though the focus is on the staff, the sword has some magical properties too.  The question in, will we ever see what it could have done for Declan?

A little more spit shine, some shading and some color does wonders here, and the magic of the staff grows even further.  Who can blame Declan for wanting to see what kind of magic the staff was going to lend to him?

The final version gets an even brighter change of colors, and even a door so that Declan can escape that little room.

The Whispers was a very fun project to work on—even though it was also plenty exhausting.  It’s not your typical story, and not being able to plot out too much in advance surely has its downsides.  All that said, I’m going to be very happy when I do get my chance to jump back in and wrap up the second half of Declan’s story!

The post Concept Art – The Whispers appeared first on Tellest.

When we were working on Quantum Quest: Merge Dungeon, we knew that we were going to have to have something on the start screen for the Kongregate version (it might not be present on mobile—we’ll have to see).  We decided to collaborate with Cristiano Reina to bring Sergei’s work to life in a new style (by way of some adorable new Merge Dungeon Babies that we’ll be showing off later).

In our initial sketch, Cristiano took monsters from all four of our starter merge rooms (slimes, undead, animals and golems) and pitted them against one unlucky adventurer.  Phaetha was one of our Quantum Quest tabletop game heroes, and we had her kind of mishmoshed in the first sketch.

Cristiano took her and made some changes, from her hairstyle, to her clothes, and even her weapon.  Phaetha kind of became the unofficial flagship adventurer because of this image.

We moved onto color, and you can see a few other things that were changed somewhat between the initial sketch and here.  The spongy-looking object inside the slime is gone, and the big Disney eyes the feathered serpent had were turned into striking red eyes instead.

Finally, Cristiano put some finished touches together, and the quality improved even more in the final piece.  There were lightning improvements, some small particle effects.  Cristiano knocked it out of the park here.

And, if you’re interested in something else that was pretty cool, my brother Matt, who helped me finance the game, put together this cool moving picture version of the art.

Remember, you can play Quantum Quest: Merge Dungeon on Kongregate today, with more versions coming soon!

The post Splash Art – Merge Dungeon appeared first on Tellest.

What better way to show his affinity to cold as a kiddo than to give him an ice pop?  That was a brilliant idea that Cristiano brought to life in his great style.

The line art barely does it justice, too.  With the shading and everything in place, Olig really pops. He’s a great final member of this group, for sure.

And in full color?  Magnificent.  Cristiano took the concepts we were building with Hozure, made it his own, and did an absolutely fantastic job with it.

We gave him a neat little background like the others in his group for consistency.  But we also have one more cool little piece…

Here’s all our adorably QQ babies in one place.  It made for a fantastic design on a T-Shirt, which I happily wore at Wizard World Comic Con this year!

While we don’t currently have anything else to show in the “babies” line-up, we’re always hard at work thinking of new ways to show off the cuter side of Tellest.  We hope to see you soon with more of these kind of things!

The post Character Art – Baby Olig Tharci appeared first on Tellest.

We’ll start off with the sketch of Kelvin.  Now a lot of people who have seen the Reinforcements box art will notice that it’s an older Kelvin who we featured, and he didn’t have the green domino mask.  So why give him one here?  Well, when Kelvin was younger, he wore the green mask as “The Emerald Adder” – and sure, there’s no reason why he should have had it with him if he was babified, but hey… I’m having fun with this so it works!

Then let’s look at the next step, a black and white version.  You should totally check out Cristiano’s artstation site at the bottom there too.

Here you can see all the green you’d expect, mixed with a fair amount of brown that really works for the character.  Some day I’ll get a version of this where he has his green cloak, but the cloak itself won’t have shrunk, haha.

And here we have the full version with a nice background that’s reminiscent of his adventurer card from the Reinforcements pack.  Cristiano did a lovely job with this one.  Just don’t forget—we have one last piece of the set to show off!  Stay tuned in a few weeks and we’ll be back!

The post Character Art – Baby Kelvin Drakos appeared first on Tellest.

We’re actually introducing a new artist that we’ve worked with for this project, Cristiano Reina.  He also did some other Quantum Quest-related work for us that we’ll show off a little later.

For now, let’s dive right into the artwork!

Cristiano started us off with a black and white sketch of the character.  Black Iron Lake is a strange place where magic doesn’t work the way it’s known to.  Callie-Flynn Xaxos is a shadow priest who actually prefers that strange place and the effect it has.  Cristiano captured the weirdness in a great way.

The first look of things in full color was awesome.  Callieflynn has this extreme confidence, even surrounded by all that strange magic and those dangerous looking crystals.  One of the things we did want to do was touch up the characters makeup a little bit.  She looked a little too glamorous for the harsh world that she is a part of.

Here you can see the final version of the piece.  We changed a little bit of Callieflynn’s face, but most of the piece remained the same.  Cristiano did great work with his debut Tellest piece, and we’re excited to show off more of his work very soon!

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