Homage: 2005
The cartoon homage begun during Episode 35. Stan!'s take on the cover of "Sons of Gruumsh."
As I chatted with Sean K Reynolds durin Episode 35, I began work on a cartoon homage to Todd Lockwood’s cover painting for the Forgotten Realms adventure, Sons of Gruumsh.
Looking at the front cover, you see a lot of orcs. Todd is quite famous for painting a lot of orcs, particularly for the cover of the RA Salvatore novel, The Thousand Orcs. A frightening bunch, for sure, but they all seem to be looking at—perhaps even flinching from—something off-screen.
That’s because the trade dress for Forgotten Realms products in the 3E era always featured a wrap-around cover image. So it wasn’t until you flipped the book over that you discovered what it was that had the orcs in such a tizzy.
Yup … a party of adventurers. Kind of a strange choice, I thought, putting the figures that represent the player characters on the back cover. But it allowed the orcs on the front to both look big and bad-ass … and still be having their butts kicked once you saw the whole image.
For this project, I’m doing all my homages in a square format. That has occasionally presented challenges, since book covers are almost always rectangular. But the challenge is multiplied with this FR format, which is basically ultra-wide-screen.
A few weeks ago, when I did my homage to Matt Wilson’s cover for Unapproachable East, I faced the same problem. In that case, I solved it by simply omitting the action from the back cover entirely. But here, I thought it was important to get BOTH sides into my drawing, so I squeezed the wide-screen scene into a square format—like a 1970s kung-fu movie smooshed in order to be aired on American TV. The result makes the PCs even smaller and more remote and makes the orcs seem even bigger and meaner.
I can live with that.
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