By this point, you’ve got to be pretty familiar with the process. Hozure started us off with a set of poses that we could choose from, and we went at it. Which one do you think we went with?

If you chose “yeah, pretty much the same one as I can see in the featured image,” you picked correctly!  This one was a cool little play on perspective, where he’s using his two magic staves to prep some cool magic. Let’s see how Hozure enhanced it going forward.

Magic looks great when it’s actually present. Those cool little violet lightning bolts ended up really making the piece come to life. I love that this guy is kind of on the big side, too. Not everyone should be thin and spry.

And here you have the final piece with a little bit of background. It helps to bring out the colors even more, if I do say so myself.

We’ve got plenty more works from Hozure on the way, so keep your eyes peeled to this website. Thanks for joining us!

The post Character Art – Darris Urza appeared first on Tellest.

Enter Kiirta, the daughter of Awake‘s Giirtu.

Since Giirtu was imprisoned after what he did to the elves and the human settlement in the book he appeared in, Kiirta has made it her mission to find her father and rescue him.

I love that Rigrena made this character her own, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to make that same deal with our other artists as well.  Kiirta has a lot of potential in the future of Tellest, and I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with her.

Here you have the full version of this character, with a gorgeous backdrop ahead of her.  I hope you liked this take on the character.  Thanks so much, Riggie!

The post Character Art – Kiirta appeared first on Tellest.

Thank you so much to all the people that made its release possible.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

The post Awake Releases on Amazon appeared first on Tellest.

It’s been a while, but if you recall, back in May, one of our Art updates was about goblins.  You see, back then, there had been no real mention of goblins with the exception of the preview for Awake that we had generated for the Kickstarter campaign.

With Awake officially releasing here on Tellest this week (in serial format, that is), it seemed like the right time to show you how the concept of the creatures on the cover came to be.  In Awake, Venathryn is tormented by the evil creatures that slayed her kin, so it was important that they be featured front and center.

Today, we have a fished version of the concept goblin to show you. Just like with the Tribal Orc that we presented three months ago, we wanted to pick something that seemed more energetic and dynamic:

“Hold the elevator!”

In Tellest, the goblins aren’t a sniveling little fodder race.  They’re among the toughest and scariest fighters you’ll ever encounter, and we wanted to convey this properly.  Paul did a great job capturing that in his artwork.

And when we throw on a coat of paint, our goblin candidate looks all the more savage and fearsome:

I’d rather not be on this guy’s bad side.

I think the tattoos, the skulls and the fur really help to voice the idea that you do not want to meet this guy on the field of battle.  Even that orc that Paul did would have a tough time with our goblin here.

Just for fun, I threw him on top of one of the concept art pieces that Dena did that we showed last month:

Obviously, I have no business superimposing anything on top of anything else, but I thought it looked cool.

So we have two races represented by Paul Davies on Tellest.com now. Which would you like to see next?  Something evil, like gnolls or lagano or harpies?  Or one of the goodly races of the world, like kobolds, kaja, avarians or the genie-like aetherites?

Either way, I’m sure Paul will continue to knock it out of the park!

The post Art: Savage Goblin appeared first on Tellest.

A few weeks back, we looked at his work on the orcs of Tellest.  We needed them to be more human and have an air of pseudo-nobility. One of the reasons that we did this was in the role of an antagonistic race in Tellest: the goblins.

In a lot of traditional fantasy, goblins are scrappy fodder enemies. They aren’t really a force to be reckoned with, and they aren’t really all that frightening, but when I knew that orcs weren’t going to be the savage, evil creatures they’re usually portrayed as, I needed our goblins to step up in a big way.

Enter Paul Davies.  We knew that we were going to have to put some humanity into the goblins, just as we did the orcs.  After all, what’s a proper villain if you can’t understand their motivations?  Here was the first set that we came up with:

Mischievous and snarky.

As you can see there, the goblins looked very different from the iterations you’ll see in a lot of other popular fantasy brands.  Our goblins are about the size of a human, and if you look at that first concept, they almost have a kind of elvish quality.  We really liked what we had there, and are apt to use that kind of goblin in some instances in the future.  We wanted something a little more vicious, a little more frightening.

This is the kind of guy I don’t want to mess with.

Now we were moving a little closer into the realm of “this guy looks like he would chew the flesh off your bones.”  And not even because he’s hungry.  He’d just do it for fun.  The goblins of Tellest are kind of like the flipped side of the coin that orcs are on.  They’re battle-tested, hardy and worthy enough foes for just about any other race.  I knew we had the right look, so we moved into the next phase, which was a full body concept.

And you thought their faces were scary.

We had a couple of different options, including a more robustly armored version of the goblin, but we wanted them to appear almost tribal in their appearance, as putting the goblin and orc side by side should really give an insight into how they compare and contrast. Again, here our goblin model almost looks somewhat like an elf in some ways.  The sideways pointed ears are a little more animalistic than the upward, classic ear shape of Tellest’s elves though.

Finally, we’ll look at one of our choices for the final sketch that would lead to a painted version:

This one is our runner up.

We’ll return in a couple weeks to show you the final piece, in all its glory.  Paul has done an insanely good job with all these concept art commissions, and the goblins are no exception!

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