New illustration, from the mind of our first Visionary

One of the donation tiers on our Kickstarter page is that of ‘Visionary’, and its unique perk is the chance to give me the art order for an illustration that will be included in the final ACKS book. We’ve only got one visionary so far: a Mr. Justin Clouse (thanks Justin!) and I just completed his art order today!

He wanted to see an illustration for the Assassin character class, and had a few ideas about how it might look:

  • See someone, presumably a contract target, hunched over in the foreground and the assassin is coming out of the shadows behind them.
  • We see our assassin pressed up against the corner of a wall with a bloody blade and in the back ground someone is checking over a body.
  • Getting away from more combat focuses, simply seeing our smiling assassin accepting a bag of coin, either for a job done or soon to come.
These all sounded cool to me, so I threw together some thumbnail sketches so he could whittle his preference down to one particular design:

I need to practice making more attractive thumbs, ha! Through this mess of doodled images, he liked design B best, and here is the result:

I had a lot of fun with this - so much so that I’m thinking of soliciting art orders from the donors above that tier as well. If you think it would be fun to yank me around like a puppet until art comes out, please support ACKS!

Well I really like it, but I might be a bit bias. I love how it came together.

-Justin

I’m glad - half of the challenge in making a good illustration is coming up with a good story or concept, and you did that for me. It makes my job easy and actually more fun! I think a lot of artists are deterred from illustration because they don’t get to do ‘their own thing’, and while I like doing my own thing too, I’ve got to say that you learn quite a bit from having to figure out visualize someone else’s ideas. Thanks!

Nice piece of work – it evokes a story and leaves the viewer wanting to know that story …very nice.