Character Portrait: The Gambler

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A bit of background on this drawing:

This one is actually from a comic that I've been working on in my spare time over the last year or so, and you may have seen the scan of the pencil artwork before.

About the character:

This is Joaquin Carlos Villa-Lobos Sabara, but he is more commonly known as "Joker" or simply "Joe". He's a man of many diverse talents, ranging from pickpocketing to sweet talking, and he's even picked up a few tricks from the various schools of magic... He could have been a useful member of society in any of a hundred different ways, but being the lazy scoundrel he is, he's made a career for himself as a card cheat. Joe drifts from seedy bar to seedy bar, gambling and hustling and living a pretty good lifestyle off of his ill-gotten winnings and then moving on to the next town quickly before his reputation for winning can catch up to him and make his life tricky.

His persona's a little bit Inigo Montoya, a little bit Ramirez, and a little bit Antonio Banderas. I always did kinda picture him sounding a lot like Puss In Boots from the Shrek Movies!

The Kev's Lounge Friday Character Portraits is a weekly feature on this blog where I take a bit of art that I've created somewhere along the line for some or other purpose and present it along with a little bit of back story for you to use as in role playing games as hand-outs, or as inspiration for characters or NPCs.  Here are some more in the series:
1. Town's Guard Captain
2. Female Rogue
3. Arch-Wizard
4. Pit Fighter 
5. Skeleton Pirate 
6. Serpent Cult Assassin
8. Flaming Skeleton
9. The Flirtatious Barmaid  

No character portrait next friday... Instead you get the first page of Live By The Sword, the comic I mentioned earlier!

Before you go, get yourself a copy of our free Gold Coin Tokens!

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Skeleton Scallywags Paper Miniatures out now!

 

Branching out in to something completely new! I proudly present the very first set of Kev's Lounge Paper Miniatures. This set of 5 exquisitely detailed skeletal seadogs will look great on any gaming table.

Get your copy of Skeleton Scallywags at Papercraft Dungeon now!

Only $1.49 before December 31st, 2012.

The figures are scaled to 28mm, and will look good alongside most popular brands of miniatures and all manner of 28mm scaled scenery. Each model has a distinctive front and back, and both sides feature rich and gorgeous detail. The detail is boosted by the high resolution of the PDF, and the colours have good contrast to make them pop at a distance!

The models are designed with removable bases. Future paper miniature releases will feature alternative base patterns and all bases will be interchangeable. Another bonus of this feature is that the flat components are really compact and very easy to store because they don't take up much room at all!

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Character Portrait: Serpent Cult Assassin

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Back with another character portrait. This is the sixth in the series. This is another old one, and those of you who have been following me for a long time may have seen this one before. I drew this one about a decade back, and it was one of my first attempts at doing a continuous tone shading in graphite.

This character started out in my AD&D 2e campaign. I'm not certain he ever had a name, and if he did, I never wrote it down. He was a Yuan-Ti Pureblood, so looked quite human, but had slitted eyes and fangs like a snake. I may have been inspired by a similar villain appearing in a Dungeon magazine adventure I'd run at the time, but how much I'd taken of that and how much was an original creation, I couldn't really say... I can't seem to find the magazine in my collection.

I did quite like the drawing, despite the fact that it doesn't really measure up to my newer stuff, and at one stage I decided to re-purpose the character as one of the antagonists in a novel that I very briefly considered writing. In this incarnation he was a human being, and an assassin for the cult of Slith, a mysterious bunch of crazies that worshipped snakes as gods, were formidable martial artists and had a certain fondness for the use of poisons. Their "religious ceremonies" consisted of seeking out "sacrifices" and ritually murdering them. This was at least partly pragmatic, as the victims were seldom random strangers and were generally people who had caused trouble for the cult or got in its way. The murder ritual would always involve a duel between the victim and assassin, with the victim being given a weapon if he had none of his own. If the victim did win he would be allowed to live because the cultists believed their serpentine gods had favoured him. This was an exceedingly rare occurrence, however, because the assassins were highly trained  and exceptionally skilled  with their swords and, as I said earlier, were very fond of using poison on their blades.


The Kev's Lounge Friday Character Portraits is a weekly feature on this blog where I take a bit of art that I've created somewhere along the line for some or other purpose and present it along with a little bit of back story for you to use as in role playing games as hand-outs, or as inspiration for characters or NPCs.  Here are some more in the series:
1. Town's Guard Captain
2. Female Rogue
3. Arch-Wizard
4. Pit Fighter 
5. Skeleton Pirate
7. The Gambler

While you're here, you might also want to check out our new set of paper miniatures!

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Character Portrait: Skeleton Pirate

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Shiver me timbers, it's the fifth of our Character Portraits! I was originally planning to dig something old out from the collection, but I had second thoughts and instead I give you something completely new! This guy was drawn very recently, (just a couple weeks ago, in fact) and a modified version of the artwork appears in our new set of paper miniatures: Skeleton Scallywags, available at Papercraft Dungeon right now!

He has yet to make an appearance in a game, but I've taken to calling him Jolly Roger because he's just such a cheerful-looking bloke with that perpetual smile on his face, and because he's a pirate, of course. There's something really appealing about an undead pirate, and I guess it's that they're more of a swash-buckling action-adventure kind of creature than a horror movie cliche, which is what your regular brand of walking dead have become. It's either that, or it's just the way they bring back all those fun memories of playing Monkey Island as a kid.

The Kev's Lounge Friday Character Portraits is a weekly feature on this blog where I take a bit of art that I've created somewhere along the line for some or other purpose and present it along with a little bit of back story for you to use as in role playing games as hand-outs, or as inspiration for characters or NPCs.  Here are some more in the series:
1. Town's Guard Captain
2. Female Rogue
3. Arch-Wizard
4. Pit Fighter
6. Serpent Cult Assassin
7. The Gambler

While you're here, check out some of our other cool stuff, like this Gelatinous Cube Mini.

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Character Portrait: Pit Fighter

Presenting Character Portrait #4... This pit fighter was drawn at around the same time as the Female Rogue, and is, in fact, a character from a different arc of the same story. The concept and look of the character were at least partly inspired by a miniature that I once threw together from various bits from the plastic Games Workshop sprues, for use in one of our many Mordheim campaigns.

This pit fighter fights under the name "Kurga the Orc". In this universe, the pit fighting scene is a little like wrestling in the modern world, except that the fights are completely real and injuries and death are completely likely. Like modern day wrestlers, the pit fighters adopt personas, and play those up for the sake of the crowd. Kurga is just a particularly large human, but his character in the pit is a savage beast known for his ferocity and his infamous skull faced helmet, prone to guttural roars as he swings his enormous barbaric axe with surprising speed and formidable skill. He's racked up an impressive list of victories over the years, and has cut short the careers and lives of many who were unfortunate enough to be paired against him... His fame (or perhaps infamy) is so wide spread that even in the more civilised parts of the world where pitfighting is taboo, if not completely illegal, his presence in a match-up is guaranteed to draw vast crowds.

 More character portraits:
1. Town's Guard Captain
2. Female Rogue
3. Arch-Wizard
5. Skeleton Pirate

In other news, we've got a special on The Humble Hovel, one of our premium papercraft scenery sets.

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Humble Hovel on special until December 25th!

 The Humble Hovel is a useful, customisable, and beautiful scenery piece perfect for use in role-playing games and tabletop wargames that use 28-30mm miniatures.

Get this set before December 25th, 2012 and save $2 on the regular price!

Buy The Humble Hovel at Papercraft Dungeon now!

With a removable roof, and walls, you can easily access the interior in the middle of a game. The design gives you a sturdy, attractive model that will certainly see a fair bit of use on your table!

This set is customisable to a great degree, allowing you to adjust it to suit your gaming needs, skill level and personal taste. With a variety of options for the outside grounds, inside floors, walls, doors, windows and rooves, there are literally hundreds of possible combinations.  Using just this one set, you could make an entire village of Humble Hovels, with no two of them being exactly alike!

 

One of the real attractions of the Humble Hovel is the awesome, intricate 3D details we've added. They add a ton of visual interest and realism for those out there who are up for the challenge! We've made the 3d details optional though, so those who don't want to fuss around with lots and lots of pieces, or just want to build the model quickly, can opt to turn it off and build a simpler version.

  

 Of course, the Humble Hovel is not just a pretty little cardboard house... it's there to be used while playing games! We've taken that into account in the design. For the games that use it, we've included an optional 1-Inch grid on the floor, which comes in two styles. The design of the piece makes it very sturdy and tough, despite the materials used to construct it, so it can handle a lot of the perils of being a piece of scenery! As mentioned before, the roof and walls are removable, to provide you easy access to the interior, should the action head indoors!

Buy The Humble Hovel at Papercraft Dungeon now!

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Character Portrait: Arch-Wizard

Here we go with the third in the series of character portraits. This one is quite an old one and may, in fact, be the first digital painting I ever attempted.This was all done with a mouse, probably using Adobe Photoshop 5 (no, not CS5) on an Apple Mac G3 at some time around the year 2000. Sadly, the hard drive of that particular computer went and had a catastrophic failure, and I lost this artwork along with many other awesome things I'd worked on in my teenage years. Before that devastating first encounter with data loss, I'd been lucky enough to get an inkjet printout of the piece, and this is a scan of it. Unfortunately, this is not the finished version... the windows are still white.

This character's name was Sunambral. He was meant to be the big bad of the campaign I'd been running at that point in time. Very little was known about him prior to the party's first real encounter with him... only small clues were given when they defeated the minions he sent after them from time to time. They did eventually meet him and he manipulated them into solving a puzzle that had had him confounded despite his great intellect.The puzzle was quite cool, and involved a groteque fountain of blood. Solving said puzzle was integral to Sunambral's greater plan to free a bloodthirsty war god who had spent millenia in bondage and, had the campaign lasted beyond that adventure, the story would have become a race to prevent the forthcoming apocalypse. Alas, real life intervened and the campaign died, with that session being the last, and this powerful wizard never really had a chance to truly develop and become something memorable.

The first in this series, a town's guard captain, is here. Last week I gave you a gorgeous and dangerous female rogue. The next is a fearsome looking pitfighter!

Have you seen the Kev's Lounge Gelatinous Cube Paper Mini?

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