With new art coming in all the time, this is a great opportunity for me to walk you through the process of creating a new illustration for the Iron Kingdoms. This particular image, featuring a shady business deal with a Talon warjack being sold to a mercenary group, is for No Quarter #53.

For this particular image, artist Ben Lo sent three different thumbnails for us to choose from. When I sat down with Ed Bourelle, Mike Ryan, and Aeryn Rudel to review our options, we all agreed we liked the first thumbnail the best. The only adjustments I requested from Ben were to shrink the Talon and add one more character to the background, as the art brief requested guards being posted to protect the questionable transaction.

From there I sent a note to Ben, letting him know which sketch we chose, along with my quick and dirty thumbnail adjustment providing more detail about the size of the Talon. Ben then went into color and sent the next stage of the piece.

To underscore the shady dealing, we went with the tarp-covered version on the bottom. My adjustments here were to remove the hat on character on the left and to shrink his nose so he didn’t appear so cartoonish. I also changed the color of the Talon so it would be Mercenary green and altered the tarp to more of a burlap color. You can see the adjustments I sent back in the image below.

Ben then sent along the next stage, moving into more clean up. Any little tweaks here are hardly noticeable, so I’ve moved on to show what we consider a final illustration. Since this was for a smaller piece, the rendering level didn’t need to be off the charts, and the emphasis here is more on the mood and in communicating the details covered in the article. Overall I’m very happy with Ben’s work, and you can expect to see quite a bit more art from him in the future!