Process Video: Dragon Magazine 137
An Exclusive for Paid Subscribers
I have a great deal of fun doing the cartoon homages for this series. It’s always an enjoyable challenge to try to capture something of the spark that these classics of fantasy art have sparked in fans over the years. But there’s something EXTRA involved when working on a drawing based on a piece that I can remember being sparked like that myself when I first saw it.
When we’re talking about the “North Guard” painting by Keith Parkinson, I have a clear memory of seeing it on the cover of issue 137 of Dragon Magazine the day it arrived on the rack at Fat Cat Book in Johnson City, NY. I didn’t buy many issues of Dragon. Several of my friends were subscribers, so I just read their copies. But sometimes a particular issue captured my attention and I just couldn’t help picking it up off the rack, if only to marvel at it. Such was definitely the case with issue 137. I’m not sure how deeply I looked through the contents, there in the store, but I know I kept picking up the issue so I could marvel at the cover, having no idea at the time that it was a zoomed in detail of a larger painting.
For a relatively straightforward image, and one where the characters’ backs are to the viewer, it begged a lot of questions. What was that creature? Can my PC ride one of those? And who is that rider? What world is that? My brain did an almost subliminal comparison to the tauntaun riding scenes on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. And no matter how many times I’d picked it up to look at it, the next time I came back into the shop I picked it up again (that is until they sold through their stock … which honestly didn’t take long).
I thought of all that as I was working on this drawing, and I hope I managed to put at least a sliver of the irresistible intrigue of Parkinson’s original painting into this cartoonish appreciation.
Subscribers to this newsletter got to see this drawing early, whereas the general public are only just getting their first glimpses of it today. But there’s still something left that’s JUST for the paid subscribers—a process video showing the step-by-step creation of this cartoon homage. (If you’re currently a free subscriber, now would be a great time to upgrade.)
