Niko's Sketchbook
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@Chantal-Goetheer Thank you~! I can totally understand how the Smaug one is confusing right now, but hopefully some shading will make it clearer! The dragon shape is meant to be Smaug's shadow looming over Bilbo. As far as Gollum goes, yeah I tried scaling him down, but when I do I wind up having to scale up his head and he looks sooooooooooo creepy. Almost fetus-like, to be honest! I'm glad ya like the stuff, though! I'm really excited to get to finishing them!
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Been sick the last few days, so I haven't done a lot of work, but I did finish up some personal work I started ages ago. I really love how the piece turned out, but it's definitely more adult and I'm not sure if it's appropriate to put in a kidlit portfolio? What do you all think?
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Also finished this piece, which is a birthday present for my dear friend featuring his Kobold character from our D&D games!
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@nikoashheart these are looking great! This looks like a really fun project to work on. It’s also great to have portfolio-wise
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Finally have an update on The Hobbit series! I've finished Chapter 2: Roast Mutton. Let me know what you think! I'll be finishing the other two in the next few days.
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Another update to the Hobbit series! I of course had to do a Gollum piece, especially after doing that concept work for him earlier, and I really enjoyed working on this one. It didn't turn out quite exactly like I intended, but honestly I think it's better! My original was more "mysterious" but it was way too dark, I think. The scene itself is apparently so dark that Bilbo has a really hard time seeing, and I wanted to reflect that in the art, but in the end I felt it better to reinterpret it for the sake of the illustration. Let me know what you think!
Smaug is up next!
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@nikoashheart wow! I love the gollum piece! Very cool. I’m really liking how you’re pushing the values with your gray scale images.
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@Pamela-Fraley Thank you!! I struggled a bit with the values, so I'm glad they're working.
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And here's the last of The Hobbit pieces, featuring the infamous Smaug! I really struggled with this one. I originally intended to do something a lot more gestural with the coins, but they just became lost in the silhouette. This took a lot longer, but I think works better. I'd love to do more of these one day, but I've got other projects to get to, so the three + the cover will have to do for now!
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It occurs to me I actually never posted the cover I don't think? So up that goes as well!
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@nikoashheart I really like this cover. Making the figures in the mountain is such a great idea. I also like the shadow Smaug idea too in the illustration above. Very clever.
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@nikoashheart I love the stylized shape of Smaug, very nice!
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@Kim-Rosenlof Thank you so much! The idea of illustrating the dwarves as the mountains spawned the rest of this project, to be honest. As soon as I had that idea, I was so excited to work on the cover~
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@Stephanie-H Thank you!