Hi everyone!

Right now we’re still plugging away at expansion cards and finally making a dent in our huge backlog of customer service emails.

Check out this flamethrower! The final image is the big one! The other four are earlier iterations of the card in the design process! The device itself was drawn by Olga and the final fire effects were drawn by Alison. The crappy photoshop mockup was by Brad.

Fire is really really hard to draw! (Ice is even harder to draw!)

I remember watching a thing about the making of the Lion King and they said they had to delay production and redraw the entire ending multiple times because they couldn’t get the fire to look right. The fire looked great in the lion king so we used it as a reference for our final art:

Here’s some things to consider when drawing fire:

• Fire is a light source so shadows cannot be cast on it (look at the earlier red iteration where there were it looks like a ribbon with shadows - it looks really cool but it doesn’t look like fire!)
• Fire can’t be semi-transparent (like the iteration on the bottom right) because it looks… weird. Fire goes from red to orange to a 100% transparent, with a soft glow around the edges. But it can’t just be a layer that you reduce transparency on or use the eraser on because it’ll look funny to see the yellow part - the brightest part - anything but opaque.
• Fire has to be really detailed. The first iteration (where the spout is longer) is a little too paint brushy. Even though fire is in motion you can’t draw it motion-blurred or it looks weird. Fire almost always photographs perfectly so motion blur doesn’t really work on it. You need to draw all the little nooks and crannies for it to look right.

Anyway, this card is so cool! It’s part of a trio of tool-like elemental items (Taser, Flamethrower, Fire Extinguisher) that share similar designs. Olga is an industrial designer so it’s super helpful to have her on board! We imagined these items were made by some sort of sinister Black & Decker-like company that gave all it’s weapons a consistent look and feel. They’re coming out great!

Check out the first new Warrior card from Story War vol 2! This card is the Mech card! The 9 pictures below are some earlier sketches and unfinished versions of the Mech that’ll give you an idea of our process.

First Brad had the idea to do “a baby kangaroo piloting a robotic mother” and then Tom drew that. Then Jaime drew various poses and we came up with the idea to give her tank treads instead of feet. Then Vondell re-drew it so that all the machinery looked technically accurate. Then we tweaked the pose to look more boxery. Then Josiah drew the background and we tweaked the colors and lighting to make him pop out of the background.

We may have some more tweaks to this one before final print, but it’s definitely good enough to post! It was a lot of work! Hopefully we’ll rarely have to put this much work into a single card again, but this character has a lot of moving parts - both figuratively and literally.

We’ve got a pretty good system of combining the talents of multiple artists onto a single character or concept and it’s really fun to work with so many cool people! We’re still open to new artist applications but we’re waiting until we nail down a style for volume 2 before we bring on anyone new.

Anyway, how cool is the Mech card? Her caption will be something like, “This genius orphan couldn’t wait to grow up so she built a metal mother.”

We’ve just added some brave new Warrior cards! If you back Story War at the Deluxe Pack level you’ll get these eight officially licensed Bravest Warriors cards!

Story War is a storytelling party game where players take on the role of fictional characters and then try to convince another player acting as a judge that their characters would win in a fight against their opponent’s characters. We started out with that classic “who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman” conversation and we kept developing the cards and playtesting the rules until we came up with this really fun game.

But obviously we can’t make a game about Batman and Superman without DC Comics’ permission! So we had to start out with public domain characters like Medusa and King Midas. One of the ideas behind Story War is that we’d build the game on public domain characters and then slowly introduce more licensed character expansions over time.

So we hope Story War will slowly grow into something like the card game version of Super Smash Brothers. And luckily for us, everyone at Cartoon Hangover is super cool and they gave us permission to make these eight new Bravest Warriors cards, which represent our first major step in that Smash-like direction!

Bravest Warriors is a great franchise to play Story War with because all of these adorable characters come with their own set of super powers. And if you want to learn the nuances of the kinds of stories you can tell with each card, all you have to do is watch the Bravest Warriors web series on YouTube!

All Story War cards are printed with a common card back, so you could easily shuffle the Bravest Warriors into your Story War deck and take them out if the people you’re playing with aren’t familiar with the show.

These eight cards are exclusively available as a Kickstarter bonus! Trying to get these cards after the campaign ends would be like trying to make oatmeal cry. So if you want to get these Bravest Warriors cards you’ll have to go back Story War on Kickstarter at the Deluxe Pack level!

vondell-makes-art:

Story War is an ongoing project that i’ve now contributed well over 100 illustrations to. It’s a very fun storytelling card game being developed by Brad O’Farrell, Tom McLean, and myself. I can’t reveal too much of the finished card artwork yet, but here is a small sample of my involvement in the project. Keep tabs on Story War by following our work blog.

Fun fact about the robot: We let playtesters draw characters on blank cards, and most of them were goofy subversive characters. Except the robot. Every single group drew a robot. Because we clearly needed a straight up robot. So now we have one!

(Source: vondellswain)

Guys! We did it! We finally finished all 100 pieces of art for Story War! There may be a few tweaks and updates before the final print, but this feels super good!

For those of you that don’t know, Story War is a competitive story telling card game that Frezned, BradOFarrell (me), and Vondell-Swain have been making for the last 6 months. We met over tumblr and most of the people who came to our playtests have been tumblr folk

We’ve done over 100 play tests and we’ve meticulously written and re-written the copy and even re-draw the art to make sure each game is as fun as possible. It’s a subjectivity game about competitive/collaborative story-telling; we’ve worked really hard to identify what is fun and not fun to talk about and we’ve shaped the cards to maximize funness. And now it’s super fun!

If you want to buy a copy, our Kickstarter is launching at the end of the month. If you want to keep in the loop, follow our blog, and we’ll let you know when it comes out! Also if you reblogged this post to help get the word out that would be awesome!

FAN ART CONTEST

We’re also going to be sending a Secret Code that you can use on the kickstarter to get a special edition of the game for a discounted price to anyone who draws fan art and posts it on the #Story War tag. It can be of the characters in this post, or anything on our blog!

Hey this is Brad here!

Aaah sorry I got a little behind on judging the Story War fan art contest! But here are the people who will be winning prototypes: tropicalwind,  flanngoh, fox-girl!

Additionally, everyone who entered fan art will be given a Secret Code. This code can be used on our Kickstarter to get a special edition of the game at a discounted price! Additionally, anyone else who posts fan art in the #Story War tag, from now on, will be sent the Secret Code.

You’re free to use any characters from the previous contest or any characters you’ve seen on our blog! As long as you have fan art in the #Story War tag, we’ll find you and send you the Secret Code. We wish we could give out free copies to everyone, but that would violate the laws of thermodynamics - so hopefully this will be enough of a “thank you” to all of our awesome ahead-of-the-curve fans!

Also, again, I’m super sorry for posting this a few days late! This week is super busy because Frezned is in town in NYC and the two of us will be shooting the Kickstarter video together this week! Do you wanna be in the video, and/or meet Frezned or me or other Story War fans? Are you in NYC? Then come to the third (and most) important Story War NYC public playtest.

I won’t say this is the “last” playtest, but the prototypes we’re using to do these playtests are going to be mailed out as contest prizes next week. We’re going to order some pretty-dang-finalized “review copies” of the game to send to board game review sites and also to use for playtesting this week, but those probably won’t arrive until after the Kickstarter has begun. So this is definitely the most important playtest, and the last big one until the Kickstarter goes live.

Man I can’t believe how talented you guys are! We really have a great fanbase for a game that’s not even out yet! You guys are super cool.

- Brad

Hey everybody! We’re about halfway through the week and I wanted to give an update on the fan art contest. This photoset shows most of the entries we’ve gotten so far. There’s still plenty of time, so if you want to win an early prototype copy of Story War, click that link and draw some fan art before Sunday!

helpfulharrie:

Source: FOERVRAENGD

List of tutorials that helped me with environmental painting:
“How to make your own Perspective Grid in PS” <—- this one is the best thing I’ve ever discovered. Srsly CHECK IT OOOOUUUUT!
Snuffen’s Background Tutorial P1More or less ALL tutorials by Griffsnuff is awesome, so make sure to check out the rest of them!
More or less ALL tutorials made by AquaSixio!

List of youtube channels that also helped and inspired me:

FZDSCHOOL - More or less one of the most known concept art-related resources I know on youtube. It’s great to sit and draw and just listen to the talking.

SinixDesign- This guy is also great! He has some design workshops ever now and then where the viewers can send in their stuff for critique! very encouraging and inspiring!

moatddtutorials- This guy is more into drawing than painting, and has a more cartoony style. He has interesting methods when it comes to perspective. And he also challenge himself in some of his videos (the engine block video is a great example of this)

foxOrian- Also known here on dA for his awesome perspective and composition tutorials. He has a youtube channel where he posts some videos that might be interesting as well.

Here are some good drawing references that our artist vondell found.

(via itsvondell)