It's Gonna Be Epic!

Had just a bit of that nostalgia feeling while doing some minor research today for the current ConceptArt.org Environment of the Week (EOW) challenge. It's the 100th challenge, so the topic has been appropriately selected as "Epic", and for my epic series narrative selection: Anne McCaffrey's Pern. Yup -- that's my not-so-great first acrylic painting posted above that I did in high school some 20 + years ago -- totally inspired by those dragons, that world, and Michael Whelan's interpretation of the same. Now, I've got to come up with something completely different! And, also still not in the direction that Tony DiTerlizzi went with his Pern version. :) The challenge deadline is December 9th to give us all enough time to come up with concept art that meets the following criteria:

• Come up with an epic narrative (my pick, "Pern")
• Your epic saga of choice is going to be pitched as an RPG
• You create 5 different environment concepts from this narrative
  
• The art must be cohesive (in other words they all need to be from the same artist style, same world and be visually designed)
  
• Presentation of your five Enviros and the design of the layout and titling counts!
  
• As does a consideration of the possible player demographic of your game.

In any case, this project will give me a great opportunity to rapidly develop some additional environment concepts which I've been lacking in my portfolio. Sketches I have plenty of, heh. This rather topsy-turvy year has somewhat allowed me to continue to revise and update my online portfolio to include more of the kinds of artwork and project opportunities that I would like to be working on all (or at least most) of the time, rather than the extremely varied art and design projects that I've done in the past just so I could pay the bills. :)

Anyways, as a long-time fan of the original Dragonriders of Pern I'll enjoy pulling out a few of those visuals that have been stuck in my head for so many years from reading and re-reading the two series (Dragonriders of Pern and the Harper Hall trilogy) from elementary school through college. Ok, alright -- I admit I still re-read the Harper books every now and again (and, nope -- I don't plan to read the new ones).