Justin Gerard posts
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The Dungeon Master Series "Oathhammer" Preview
Many of you are asking, "What ever happened to the Dungeon Master Series?" And, "DoesJustin even draw anymore?" and, "Are all of his castles built on a foundation of LIES?!?!" Well, today I finally have an update for those of you asking for more adventure! Our classic crew has been languishing in an orc prison for the past month, ...still waiting to be broken out. While working out a plan for how to go about that, I started work on a pair of paintings that fits the Fantasy-Adventures-Gone-Terribly-Wrongtheme of the Dunge...
Martians of the Month: Robots and Rock Raiders
This month we've got 2 new spreads from the Martian of the Month Sketchbook! The first features some very outdated technology that is well past its planned obsolescence date... I had a lot of fun going back to some really old 1990 tech for designing the robots. Next month we've got the NEW and improved version (based off the FUTURISTICdesigns from the year 2000...) The second spread is anotherset of baddies I really enjoyed designing. They were meant to be space hippos with crocodile eyes, but we somehow ended up here. Their faces are ...
Martians of the Month for February
Today we continue on our sightseeing tour of the galaxy with 2 interplanetary menaces: First, the "Stranded." Leftovers from the leviathan invasion, who were left aboard ships when the Leviath fleet left the system. Now they haunt the abandoned stations and derelict ship hulls drifting in the vast orbital graveyards. And more from the Vetch series of carnivorous-space-zombie-plants. I love drawing these ones, but the stat sheets have been harder to work out! As usual when I run into a writing problem, a voice in my heads says, "Le...
Mulberries, Moss, & Poison Hemlock. Good & Evil Spirit Drawings for February!
Today I have 3 drawings of characters to introduce to you from the Good & Evil Spiritsproject. This first one is a yet-to-be-named walking pebble the locals simply call "Mossy." Mossy will be our monochrome oil painting for the month. Next is Madame Hemlock. She started out as a good spirit of Queen Anne's Lace, but somewhere along the way during the drawing she turned into a Hemlock witch. (Turns out it is very easy to get these two confused for novices like myself.) I'm not sure what twisted this drawing of her from good to ev...
More Secret Project Sketches...
Today I have a few more exploratory sketches to share with you from the *secret* projectI am working on with Annie. I've been steadily sketching these little characters and locations out in between my other work.I'll be sharing more of the themes and story for these images later on in a larger post introducing the series, but for now I am mostly just exploring everything and turning my tiny little inspiration scribbles into larger drawings.Most of these tiny little scribbles look like the ones above. I have an entire sketchbook of work ...
Martians of the Month
This month for the martian sketchbook, I am working with Squids! The mainstay units of their invasion fleet. I have been looking forward to working on these characters for a long time. The squids were one of the earliest factions I designed, and the one that I have probably had the clearest vision for overall. Not sure why it has taken me so long to post them! I've got about 15 other units like these that are already drawn, I just need to clean up and drop into the section four layout. Next month will hopefully be "The Stranded" uni...
"The Aphid Rancher" Final Color and Guide
This month's Monster of the Month is the Aphid Rancher. Though not quite a monster himself, his aphids definitely are. (If you ask the tomato plant anyway.) The Aphid Rancher is a character personifying the tragedy of the commons. "Take everything you can, let others care for the common good!"He exists only for his aphid honeydew, and the rest of the world can burn so long as he's got it. This character was done as an exploration for a project Annie and I have been slowly developing. My goal this month was to produce one charact...
Secret Project Sneak Preview
For some time now, my wife Annie and I have been developing a nature guide book together. It is in the early stages, and not quite ready to be released out into the wild, but I plan to start sharing the drawings and paintings we've finished here with you first.Much of this is conceptual art, so the text and design may change as we go along. What is certain is that the project features characters and scenes on a much smaller scale than the rest of our work, exploring places often unseen or overlooked by humans.The project will feature a lot ...
Airship Battles and Behind-the-Scenes Previews
This month I have a painting of some glorious aerial mayhem for you! It is a cover for a tabletop game featuring airships and sky islands. (I will link it here when it goes live.) The cover was a ton of fun to paint, especially the explosions, which I feel like I just never can get enough of!The process was pencil and digital, and it moved along much like my other paintings, using the "Cycle Method" I've described in my previous tutorials, slowly building up layers of light then color over the drawing, adding detail with each new la...
October 8th, A Sighting in the Woods
At 9:13 on October the 8th, I had just let my dogs out and was standing on the porch when I heard something crunching in the woods near my house. The dogs barked and ran back to the door. As I turned to look toward the direction of the sound I was startled by a tiny creature with 4 wings and a frog face that flew up to me from the brush, and then flew away at great speed. It was as if it had tried to warn me in some forest language that I couldn't hear or understand. As I watched it fly up into the shadows, my eyes registered upon something...
Justin Gerard's Materials List for Mobile Pencil Artists
In this post I am going to share my favorite materials for drawing "under-the-circumstances".This is something I developed out of necessity after having kids, while trying to maintain a work/life balance of watching them as babies, and also keeping my job. Now that they are older and less prone to climb gates or pull lamps over or microwave the cat, I find this mobile studio continues to deliver, and has allowed me to finish hundreds of professional drawings wether on the couch, at the park, waiting for the oven to preheat, or back at t...
Roadmap 2025
As dangerous as it is to make New Year’s resolutions, or big plans for a year in general, I still like to set some basic goals and expectations. Having a target helps me stay motivated, and always results in greater productivity and accomplishment for me. So without further ado, here are the projectsI plan to be working on this next year, and the formatI'll be sharing them in!:PROJECTS:#1 The Dungeon Master Series, Volume Two CALENDARThe Kingdom has fallen and our heroes are in the shadows, living as strangers in a strange land. The serie...
2024 YEAR in REVIEW
At the end of a year I like to look back and see what my goals for the year were, and do a post-mortem on how my plans turned out. One might think that this kind of harsh internal scrutiny at one's own failures is a sure-fired way into a spiral of depression and self-loathing; but I like it!Failure is okay! If you aren't FAILING, then you aren't setting your sites high enough! DREAM BIG, FAIL BIG; that's what I always say.So did we fail or succeed in 2024? We can actually see, with METRICS! In our ROADMAP 2024postI set out 4 maj...
Martians of the Month for December 2024
This month, as promised, we are catching up on spreads for the Martian Sketchbook. First!: We've got the giant caterpillars, the "Ion Worm" and the "Plague Tyrant". Their webs overtake entire space stations as they chew their way through the hulls, but no one yet knows what horror emerges from those cocoons.... Next, the scavengers: And finally, I'll leave you with some sketches I never had a chance to drop into the spreads, but deserve a moment in the light: "Mutant Space Crickets"... Next month we will return...
Drawings for December 2024!
This month for the Classic Fantasy Art SeriesI have a quick preview of what's on the easel next for me:Some of you may recognize this particular cast of characters. I had expected to let them ride off into the sunset and have a rest in 2025. I even had a whole new series on the "City Watch" planned out for a 2025 Calendar:...But as I sat down to sketch the next 12 images out, they ended up sneaking back into the story. It's their own fault really. They faked their credentials to get hired onto the city watch (for the medical ben...
Spacefarer's Guide Redesign and New Pages
Today I am happy to share (what I hope is) the FINAL FORM of the Spacefarer's Guide to Intergalactic Pests!It’s been a blast making drawings for the book, something I’ve been doing in the evenings before bed. (Nothing like going to sleep with alien horrors on the brain…) I will be sharing more of these each month as I get them written. (The writing is always the time-consuming part for me.) With any luck I'll be able to send the book off to the printers by summer. So why the redesign? What was wrong with the old design??Truthful...
ROADMAP + Letsdrawmonsters Poll!
First, before we get into what you can expect on here for the month, let's reveal what the patented JustinAIbot gave us for #LETSDRDAWMONSTERSthis month!: As usual, I had a hard time picking which one. So instead of doing the hard work and thoughtfully considering the merits of each one, I decided to throw it up on a poll and let you decide! Vote below for either the Frostopotamus, the Hedgefrog, or the ShadowMare! Whichever wins by tomorrow morningwill be our pick. I will be going live on Twitch at 10AM EST and will share my reference and...
Happy Halloween!!
You encounter a small Doglin wizard. He offers to help you on your quest. Do you accept?Happy Halloween everyone!-jg
6 Photoshop Brush Sets
Attached below is big .abr file with all 6of my brush sets for 2024 so far. I'm sorry they are so late, I have been putting this post off for a loooooong time... I made these 6 sets and meant to post them several months ago, but then Adobe Photoshop BETRAYEDthe art community by taking our work without our consent, attempting to replace us with generative AI trained off our work, and trapping us in an unethical subscription model that we can't cancel. I had hoped that by now, Photoshop would have either A. Cleaned up its act on its own...
Halloween Drawings from the Dark Wizard's Market...
Today I have some early Halloween drawings for you from the Dark Wizards Market!These are all exploratory work for the 2026 Dungeon Master Series. As with a lot of the others thus far, these focus a bit more on side quests, strange little shops and a giant market for dark wizards. I'm having a lot of fun with all merchants and potion-makers, as well as the strange, motley assortment of shoppers, like the half-ogres searching for a new helmet above. We are all still pretty sick here, (the school sicknesses always seem to hit us this time of...
Illuxcon Originals Preview
Hello all, some bad news for any of you attending Illuxcon later this week. Annie has come down with pneumonia, and at this moment, it seems like we aren't going to be making it to this year's Illuxcon. This is really disappointing for us both as she and I both finished 2 paintings each for the event. So we will be missing it, but today, I wanted to share some of these new originals I had planned to show there, including 2 new watercolor warriors from this month's poll. One of which is the "Worried Werewolf" above. These we...
Snap POLL for the Next Watercolor Warrior!
I need your help choosing which character to paint for this month's watercolorwarrior! "Warrior" may actually be too strong a term for most of these figures. Theme-wise, these are all characters you might meet if you were running a booth at a market for Dark Wizards. Some need curses broken, some need medicine, some need rare pet food, and all have come to your booth for help!Who fits that idea the best?Which would you most want to see finished in color?Note: I need to get started on this YESTERDAY, so this is a veryquick poll! It i...
Hi-Res October Drawings : Part I
I've been busy drawing this month and today I have a collection of several hi-res drawingsto share with you! All of these were done in preparation for this year's Illuxcon where I plan to display the originals for sale. The images are explorations for the next iteration of the Dungeon Master Series. Primarily, this series will be focused on creating content for Calendar 2026, but there is also a fun little card game component I am working on related to it. The characters in today's posts are primarily dedicated to that, which is wh...
#LETSDRAWMONSTERS No.30 & October Roadmap!
Update Oct. 2, 2024: My computer crashed, then caught fire, and finally was pulled into the warp by cosmic demons, just as I launched the scheduled stream today. I am hastily ordering new parts, and hoping to get them in and up in time do the stream 10AM EST on Friday October 4, 2024. More updates to follow on the Discord... -jgOKAY, LET'S JUMP RIGHT IN: We've got an awesome monster for the month! And one that I promise was picked totally at random, (which I am pretty sure no one here will ever believe that, because even I wouldn't...
"Kobold With a Cold" and a Trove of Other New Drawings!
I am NOT dead, and yes I still make art! We survived hurricane Helene with only minor scrapes, and while the power is still on here I am uploading a batch of much-delayed art for you! First, a much delayed hydra:It was drawn in the new color-pencil style we've been working with recently (and which I am still loving!). For anyone interested in it's evolution, here is a shot of the original concepts I sent in: And I have a few more characters accompanying the "Kobold with a Cold." The first is the boy with the "Snifflin Griff...
#LETSDRAWMONSTERS #29 "The Terrorkeet"
This month we are back with a classic! The Terrorkeetis the creature for September and we will be getting started within the hour! As per our new format, this offering is what we received by chance from a set of 3 random offerings from the cards. It was a close one though, as the other 2 were awesome sounding as well!:Very likely you are looking at a preview of next month's creature, the "Gentle Troll Badger, Guardian of the Meadow". (Though my kids are also voting for a barn-destroying armadillo...)But the Terrorkeetwas just too go...
September Watercolor Warrior!
I'm back from DragonCon! It was an amazing show and we had an awesome time there this year. We ate good food, saw crazy costumes, bought some amazing art, ...and brought back a bit of the classic con crud.So I am still not exactly unpacked yet, nor have I done anything of the hundred or so other things I was supposed to do, and instead I found myself just sitting and painting monsters for awhile. And shows like Dragoncon are always really inspiring, and leave me excited to paint again. Anyway, I thought I'd share the results of this p...
Psst... DragonCon Previews! I got DragonCon previews for you!
It's that time of year again and I've got a couple posts to share some of the goods that I'll be purveying this year!:First, we've got a ton of prints and originals from our recently-released cards from Magic the Gathering's Bloomburrow series, such as the drawing of "Crumpet" shown above, and "Beastmaster Ascension" shown below. I'm bringing about 20 original drawings and 12 new prints from the series alone!And while much of what I am bringing to Dragoncon this year bringing revolves around the art for B...
Dungeon Master Series Calendar & New Illustration!
This month I am pleased to finally release the Dungeon Master Series 2025 Calendar!It features all of the illustrations from the Dungeon Master Series thus far, plus some bonus material and drawings!And it features a new one!: "If You Are Reading This, It's Already Too Late..."I had planned a tutorial on this, but alas, the process turned out to be a mess. If I ever do a tutorial it will only be in the way of a cautionary tale and a list of things not to do. That said, I like how the final turned out and it stands as a nice send-off...
#LETSDRAWMONSTERS Returns! Starting Today at 10AM EST
Live on: twitch.tv/justingerardillustrationAs promised, today we dive back into LETSDRAWMONSTERS! It's season 2 and this time, we are letting the fishbowl fates decide the prompt for us! I'll explain more about the format on stream, but here is what they gave us for this month:And of the 4 randomly assembled creatures, we are going with the: (Though we may need to come back to that Armadillo...) The details again for anyone who missed it: LETSDRAWMONSTERSis a community event where I provide a prompt for a newly discovered imaginary crea...
