Homage: Dawning of a New Age
Just for subscribers: The exclusive premiere of Stan!'s latest cartoon homage
Well, if you’ve tuned into the livestream over the last couple of weeks, you know I’ve been working on my cartoon homage to Jeff Easley’s cover painting for the first novel in the Dragonlance: Fifth Age line—Jean Rabe’s The Dawning of a New Age.
As I said during one of the episodes, Jeff had a daunting challenge of not only helping to give a fresh look to this new era in one of the company’s flagship settings, he also had to create a look look for all new, bigger than anybody’s ever imagined dragons (pretty much on the scale of kaiju) … so it had to be recognizable AND unlike anything the fans had seen before. Of course, he pulled it off with deceptive ease. He’s Jeff Easley, after all.
Of course, now I was trying to interpret that and filter it through a cartoonish lens, with the extra challenge that unlike most of the drawings I’ve done, I was actually AT the company and PART of the creative process for this one (as a member of the DL5A Team). Maybe I was inspired by the fact that I’m particularly partial to the dominant shade of blue in Easley’s original (you may recall me saying something like that when I did the homage to the original Fiend Folio cover), but I’m really happy with how this one turned out.
As a subscriber to this newsletter, you’re seeing this art before it is released for general consumption. Please share this newsletter with friends who are also fans of TTRPGs or fantasy art in general. The best promotion we can get is word of mouth … and your opinion matters! Drop us a line if you have any comments or suggestions for the newsletter or the livestream shows