yo yo, so blizzcon has come and gone, and if you were there then you must've picked up the cinematic artbook for the wraith of the lich king...cuz it reeks of awesomeness! there was an exclusive hardcover blizzcon edition designed by the great bernie kang, a very very talented concept artist and an even better ping pong loser...at least to me that is. the book covered pretty much all of the preproduction artwork as well as matte paintings and the process that it took to make the cinematic for the Wraith of the Lich King. it features the art from myself, bernie kang, graven tung, and the ever so late and talented brian huang(resident homeless cinematic hobo...the boy eats garbage!!!=P), it also showcase the matte painting skills of the furor of matte painting Chris Thunig, Mister GSP french canadian Jonathon Berube, the enemy of the german blitzkrieg Peter Swigut, the prince of scarab the arab himself Alex Murtaza, and the true Frenchman from the depths of france mister "Whatever Dood" Matias Verhasselt(i think his work is in there). Blizzcon itself was great, it's always a great time when you meet the fans of blizzard games, awesome and interesting people, they definitely have my appreciation and gratitude. so if you didn't get a chance to pick up the book, good news, the book will be available in a few weeks on amazon.com. once i find out when i'll post up a link. so on to some artwork! here are a few pieces from the book and i'll post more soon.
all images in this post are copyright of blizzard entertainment.For the Wraith of the Lich King i primarily designed the undead scourge army, so intially i did some thumbnails, heres a few. i had fun with these, i tried to incorporate some personality as well as some interesting, readable silhouettes. the dude scratching he's head, yup you guessed it thats my silhouette fu!
heres a few more pieces of exploration where i added a bit more detail. come to find out that the undead army where mainly human, oh well... but come'on who doesn't like an undead female dranei stabbing herself?! i know i do, she's freaking hot, whoop whoop!
so there was suppose to be a race of gigantic undead viking type creatures called 'vrykul' in the cinematic. i took the guy in the middle of the three above and decided to redesign and color him intending him to be the vrykul, they decided to go in a different direction and all together cut the race from the cinematic. the direction that they went is very cool and i can't wait for you guys to see them in game, still this is one of my favorite pieces.
i also got to be a part of the exploration for the undead dragon Sindragosa, i may have misspelled her name. anyway i wanted to explore the idea of an armored dragon and came up with this concept. brrrrrr charlie murphy, you're cold as ice!!!! totally random, i know.
On WOTLK we explored different ideas of how arthus would look like, in this piece i imagined him to be totally immersed with nerzul, the lich king armor. i focused more on how arthus and the helm merged to one incorporating elements of his helm into his face and head. the body isn't too finished as i mainly focused on the head. it would later be decided that arthus would remain the same as we last saw him in the warcraft 3 expansion, except he's armor would be updated and detailed alot more...who has two thumbs and worked on the details of arthus, (pointing at myself with both thumbs like an idiot) this guy....
i'll post more later. i hope you guys dig this and pick up the book when it's available. it was a pleasure working on this cinematic with a talented director like Jeff Chamberlain as well as a very very talented group of artists and animators.
P.S. i'm trying to update my links, so if you have me linked i definitely owe you one shoot me an email.
all images in this post are copyright of blizzard entertainment
