Miniature Giants

Hill Giant Barbarian

I mentioned in my Fire Giant post that I had already tackled Fire Giants before, but they were miniature designs rather than full paintings. I have done quite a lot of Giant miniature designs for WotC, but they are the sort of work that rarely sees the light of day, except on occasions like now.


Fire Giant Raider

Miniature designs present a unique set of challenges. Both front and rear views are normally required. This is to give the sculptor as much information as possible, and other incidental sketches might also need to be included.



Frost Giant Fury

Creating these 'turnaround' views demands the ability to visualise the figure in three dimensions and to mentally rotate it on it's axis. I usually sketched the front loosely then scanned it, flipped it, then printed it out on tracing paper. This new template gave me a general framework to work on for the back view, but did include notable distortions that one neded to be aware of. Most prominently in the plane that the figure was stood on.





Fire Giant Forgepriest

Alongside this challenge I also needed to create an interesting pose that conformed to the strictures of the casting process. The policy that WotC adopted was that the rarer the figure the more complicated the casting could be, but nonetheless challenging constraints still remained, and I learnt a lot about working towards designs as opposed to illustration. Two overlapping but distinct disciplines.



Fire Giant Titan

Oh, and it has been really nice to receive the complimentaruy copies of these. Seeing my sketches transformed into figurines has been great, and they proudly sit on a shelf next to my monitor :)