Lotro Badge Icons

Here are some badge icons I designed for Lord of the Rings Online. I was helping Jay Brewer, an extremely talented UI (User Interface) artist in establishing the designs for the badge icons. These badges are basically small icons to show you the accomplishments you have achieved throughout the game. While designing them I had to make sure they were simple designs regarding shapes and color so that you could see and identify each badge since they are very small on the screen. This was a fun break from drawing monsters and armor and it was fun to help out with the UI of the game. Nothing special but I thought I'd share:)

--Murchie

Dark Numenorean

Here is one of the Dark Numenorean concepts from Lord of the Rings Online. I had a really fun time with this concept and I learned a lot about complimentary colors and loved painting the drippy, translucent, organic qualities. Man...I need to paint some zombies soon. One of the fun things about working on Lord of the Rings Online was that I got to concept, design and paint so many monsters and creatures with interesting textural qualities. This really helped me learn many painting techniques as well as exploring color.

--Jeff

Bug Bear Concept from Demon Stone for the PS2

I totally forgot about this concept until just recently. This is one of the concept designs (haaha....one of the only ones I would still want to show) from Forgotten Realms, Demon Stone. I had the priveledge of working as a fulltime freelance concept artist for Stormfront Studios a year after graduation and I had a great experience working with everyone. If you have not played the game you should check it out. Its on the PS2 and should be really cheap to buy since its been out for a couple years.

Fat Orc

Here is an Orc I concepted for Lord of the Rings Online. The computer model and render that you see here was made by Daniel Williams after seeing my art in the December 2006 issue of Imagine FX. He is an incredible modeler and works for Blue Sky, the makers of Ice Age and Dan is now working on Dr. Seuss' "Horton Hears a Who!" You should check out his awesome work at his blog: http://www.pointpusher.blogspot.com/

Fire and Ice Worm Variants for Lord of the Rings Online

Here are a couple of old "Worm" concepts for Lord of the Rings Online. Basically they are dragons without wings. The game needed a bunch of variants for different regions in Middle Earth. The "Fire" and "Ice" variants are just two of the versions that I concepted. There was another snow variant, a colorful poison variation and an earth variant. This way we were able to get multiple monsters that looked very different without the additional cost of another mesh.

An old unfinished concept.....

This is an old drawing from a year or so ago that I never finished and now I am finally getting around to it. Hopefully I'll get it done soon. If anybody has any suggestions please let me know! Thanks!

--Jeff

New LOTRO concept update

Here are a couple more concepts from LOTRO that you may have seen on the LOTRO official website but I have not shown them myself just yet.

The first monster is the Rogmul, which literally means "Demon Slave" in the dark tongue. Wow that sounds dorky:) I have attached a screenshot from Lord of the Rings Online with the Rogmul which was modeled in Maya by Mark Lizotte, a very talented production artist. The beautiful environment in the screenshot was conceptualized by my friend Todd Rueping who is an incredibly talented artist.

The second monster is called the Gurturog which is a troll that was bred to be more intelligent.

I hope you like these new additions!

-Murchie

Reepicheep from Narnia and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader"

Here is an old painting of one of my favorite literary characters. His name is Reepicheep and he is a character from the Narnia series and first appears in "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." This painting is not finished and I will complete it soon...hopefully:) I love cartoons and I think I am going to try to draw a bunch of Narnia characters soon. Narnia is one of my favorite series of all time along with Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I especially love "The Magician's Nephew", "The Horse and His Boy" and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader."

Snowbeast

Here is my Snowbeast concept for Lord of the Rings Online. I wanted to push the boundaries a bit. We needed characters that were a little more fantastic and everybody likes gorillas/monkeys so this was our compromise. Thanks for looking!

Angmarim Nomad Concepts for Lord of the Rings Online

Here is my design for one of the Angmarim Nomads. in Lord of the Rings Online. Hope you enjoy:)

-Murchie

Here is a quick sketch of one of my favorite historical and inspirational individuals of all time, Frederick Douglas also known as "The Lion of Anacostia."
I love drawing cartoons but I end up spending too much time rendering them out and I'm going to try to force myself to whip out a bunch of quick sketches.

"Baffled, entangled, and discouraged, I had at times asked myself the question, May not my condition after all be God's work, and ordered for a wise purpose, and if so, Is not submission my duty?" -- Frederick Douglass

One of my armor designs for LOTRO

Well, thats me working at Turbine in a full suit of Plate Mail armor:) One of the artists, Jeanette Chamberlain, brought her husband's suit in for me to wear for "reference." haha!
Here is the first second age elven armor set I designed for Lord of the Rings Online. I designed dozens of armor sets for the Dwarves, Elves, Breeland Human and Westernesse classes. I decided the best way to concept the armor sets in mass quantity would be to create the paper barbie doll accessory route. I would have literally 100 or more layers in a Photoshop document with each piece or variation of armor that I could swap in or out and combine with armor pieces from other races or classes. I painted all the armor sets from a frontal view so that the production/texture artists could use my concept and painting as a base for the in-game textures.
There are always challenges with each project you work on. Lord of the Rings needs to seem like its high fantasy but also realistic and believable (so I could not design the huge spikey silhouette breaking shoulder pads and helmets that you see in World of Warcraft or Warhammer). Sticking to a more conservative armor silhouette is very difficult and limits your options. Also, we could not design helmets that came down below the nose since one of the races, the Dwarves, all have beards. Since all the helmets need to fit every race we were not able to have full helms unfortunately.
I hope you like my first generic elf armor set and hopefully I will have more up soon!

Witch King Design Featured on PC Gamer Cover!!

I was very excited to see the my Witch King's design from Lord of the Rings Online of the Cover of PC Gamer!! I also uploaded the orthographies I drew to help the modelers:)

This piece was recently accepted into Spectrum 14 which will be published this November!! It is such a honor to be in the company of so many amazing artists!

Lord of the Rings Online was finally shipped yesterday, April 24, 2007!! So far it has been received very well in the MMO community and I hope it becomes a huge success. I was very blessed to work at Turbine for a little over 2.5 years on Lord of the Rings Online, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game(MMORPG). I worked with a number of very talented artists that I hope to work with again in the future. This is my "Witch King of Angmar" design. I went through a few iterations and thumbnail sketches before we settled on this design. We wanted to give the Witch King something more than just a simple crown but we did not want to just plop a helmet over his hood. The movie design was great but Tolkien did want it to be clear that there was a ghost-like void under his hood. We decided in a way to frame the void, almost drawing the viewer into it. Since there is not much color when it comes to the Nazgul I added in as much color as possible through the different types of metal. I was pretty pleased in how this design turned out (which almost never happen:) I was definitely going for a different look and I wanted to try and maintain that ghost-like quality and also give him a design that was very high fantasy but realistic and believable . This character was also modeled for a high res CG Cinematic whose model can be seen on the official Lord of the Rings Online site ( http://www.lotro.com/ ). I think it turned out very nicely. I will post the orthographies I drafted as reference for the production artists/modelers. I hope you like my version of the Witch King!

-Murchie

Uruk Hai concept featured on Computer Games Magazine Cover!!

Here is the Uruk-Hai concept I conceptualized for Lord of the Rings Online that was featured in the CG cinematic as well as on the November issue of Computer Games Magazine. This was the first design that I had featured on a magazine cover. Also...heh, the hand of Saruman on the armor is actually my handprint scanned in and layered into the texturing for the CG model for the cover:) I hope you enjoy!

--Jeff

A Few Lord of the Rings Online Concepts

Wierd Alien Dude

ImagineFX Demo Orc

I was really excited when I was asked if I would write and paint a demo for the December 2006 issue of ImagineFX magazine. I painted this orc showing the step by step process that I take with every painting....of course that process is constantly evolving. They wanted me to paint an orc to accompany the article about the concept art for Lord of the Rings Online. My good friend from Columbus College of Art and Design, Todd Rueping and I, designed all the characters and environments for LOTRO. Here is a link to his website: http://trueping.com/ . He's really freaking amazing. It really was an awesome experience designing the expanded Tolkien world and I learned so much.

--Murchie

Space Monkey Thingy

This is a personal concept of mine that represents what I love most. I love painting with crazy colors which I think my friend Josh Shaw helped inspire. I also love playing around with strange organic shapes. I never finished this concept but I will go back in sometime soon to finish out the details and flush out the ear and right side of his face. I hope you enjoy and I will be posting more soon:-)

-Murchie