John Tedrick
@tedrick-art
Illustrator and concept artist at Wizards of the Coast Fantasy and horror artist WARNING: some artwork may be graphic in nature or contain mature content.
Difference negative is a negative image made with a Difference layer in Photoshop, it puts contrasting color in the shadows and highlights, like shown. This is opposed to manually selecting the shadows, highlights and different midtones and coloring them individually.
I think I’m switching over to pencil for initial linework. It’s just faster for me to get crisp linework on paper.
Update of the Savanna Dragon. I don’t plan on going back to many of these, but this one I felt needed a little more.
Because it was requested last week: Here’s a look at how I generally start my paintings compared to the final piece. I generally lay in all the technical decisions, on pose, lighting, and color composition, in the first 30-60 minutes of my piece, after which it’s all detailing.
For a while now, I’ve been wanting to do this. I’m going to start in this August, ahead of Month of Monsters 6 in October. The original 13 pieces. Remade.
Flashback to when I took a crack at redesigning Godzilla. I’m thinking about doing it again in the not too distant future. And this time it won’t just be the king.
I’m thinking this morning about how in another reality, Alien vs Predator might have kicked off a Godzilla scenario where the Alien (or Predator) duked it out each new entry with a different alien creature, either original or from another IP.
Slow goings on this one. I’m working on a new benchmark piece which, if all goes to plan, will set the new standard for my professional work going forward.
EIDOLONS More concept art for an unofficial document I made for a Final Fantasy XVII.
This document, which ended up being well over 500 pages of text, included a cutscene and dialogue script, main scenario field and dungeon walkthrough, and detailed layouts of every boss encounter.
Monster Encounters! Some redesigns I made for a Final Fantasy XVII main scenario document.
Another color for the blue dragon, this time a bit poppier, using the Difference Negative rather than Selective Value Color. I think this is going to unlock some things for my work!
The black and white. I wanted to try a similar map for specular/gloss, but it didn‘t work here.
Made a color version of an old black and white D&D fan art piece of mine. I’ve been practicing with getting a quick map of color for grayscale that doesn’t feel like crude washing. I think coupling a basic color wash with a value color map gets most of it.