Generations Bit 1

This is the first piece I started on in my Generations project for Conceptual Illustration based on Role-Playing Games. We were instructed to just start drawing/painting without doing any preliminary work.
For this piece, I did just that. I taped off a section of illustration board and started painting in acrylic paint. I did shoot reference photos first because I knew what my subject matter was going to be. But I didn't know compositionally how it would turn out.

This piece is based on my first real introduction to table-top role-playing games. My brother Jon is roughly 9 years older than me. He was really into Dungeons and Dragons when he was a teen and young adult. He tried to get me to play the game with him a few times but I found it to be really boring and slow. It took a whole day just to create my character. So to liven the game up, he thought up the great idea of using my LEGOs to act out the scenes as we played the game. It was really fun that way. So in this piece you'll see several references to LEGOs such as the archer in the forground.

The other pieces you see in there are from a game that was somewhat inspired or based on D&D called HeroQuest. It's an RPG board game. The characters you see in here are the Chaos Warrior, mummies and orcs. Just like I explained in Bit 3 of my Generations series, HeroQuest is also a cooperative game and is NOT competitive. The other players in the game are on your side and you work together to get through the dungeon. I think I first played this game when I was about 10 or so and I LOVED it! It actually didn't belong to us. My brother had borrowed it from a friend and I got to have it for a while until we had to give it back. Sometime last year I was reminicing about the game and thought about seeing if I could buy it anywhere. Unfortunately the game is out of print but I was able to get a used game off of eBay for like $40. For those of you who are into Games Workshop games like Warhammer, HeroQuest is very much like Warhammer in the design of the characters and such. HeroQuest isthe game that started it all and is the predecessor of Warhammer.