Battle Merchants

It has been another age since life last stirred within the dusty halls of the Tower of Ur. But once more, those great doors with their intricate carvings creak open, and a lone wizard returns from his wanderings throughout the wastes of the universe. How much time has passed? Months... Years... Centuries... Eons? He cannot tell. But the rituals and rites of the Wizards of Ur remain steadfast and unchanging, the passage of time means nothing here....

So, I've got a bit of new Ur-worthy work to share. I've been off doing a lot of children's book illustration and suchlike of late, which you can always take a look at over on my website: http://www.whelon.com

But I've been doing some stuff for a new board game called BattleMerchants for Minion Games, and here's some of what I've done so far.

Next I need to tackle the cover art, but here are the actually characters that grace the board. In the game you play a medieval arms-dealer selling weapons to the the local tribes of Orcs, Hobgoblins, Elves and Dwarves who are always doing battle with one another. Your job is not to care who wins, but to make as much profit as possible from their activities!

Here are the four merchants:

And here are the four races:

As you can see, I went with a bit of a more painterly style than I usually do. I've been doing a lot of cartoony stuff for children's books, which has been really fun, but I thought this project would be a good excuse to try my hand at something a little meatier.

Here's the current version of the board. The more astute wizards among you will not that I have made ample use of Wizard Nate's premium font 'Dwarvern Axe' from his Blambot.com site. I feel like this is the job that that font was born to do! It's absolutely perfect for it anyway ;) I still need to tweak the Logo quite a bit, haven't really done much to that yet, but you get the general idea.