Thursday, December 22, 2011

Book of Cain: Behind the Scenes

A few months ago, Blizzard Entertainment, the game publisher that had developed World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo,  commissioned me to do some pencil drawings for their book called “Diablo III: Book of Cain.” The book has just been released.



(Video link.) I drew the floating city of Pandemonium, the center of creation in the Diablo universe. While I worked, I shot some video. My parakeet, Mr. Kooks, hung out on my shoulder and supervised.


The book was conceived as an in-world artifact, representing the lore about the heaven and hell, as recorded by the character Deckard Cain.


I felt honored to be included on the team of artists who worked on this book. The other contributors include Jean-Baptiste Monge, Iain McCaig, Adrian Smith, Mark Gibbons, Brom, Alan Lee, John Howe, Joseph Lacroix, Victor Lee, Christian Lichtner, and Petar Meseldžija.
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Diablo III: Book of Cain
on Amazon
Wikipedia on Diablo III: Book of Cain
Visit or join the GurneyJourney channel on YouTube

Previously on GurneyJourney:
Portrait of Ben Thompson (Blizzard senior artist)
A Visit to Blizzard Entertainment (2010)

6 comments:

runninghead said...

Great work sir!
Looks like fun. Mr.Kooks is beautiful and so well-behaved.
My own senegal parrot, Sprout, is far too bitey to sit on my shoulder while I work.

Love the reflection device going on in Pandemonium, and the swirly background.

I worked in a sawmill a long time ago and had to stand up all day working a big machine.
One day I fished a spiky torn-off tree stump out of the machine and I kept it.
I spent hours a day looking at that thing, over many weeks, imagining it as Pandemonium. After a while I had all sorts of ideas as to how Pandemonium might operate, the sort of unholy ecosystem that might exist within it's towering, blasted walls. Eventually I had to chuck it on the conveyor belt and watch the machine chew it in to sawdust!
Thanks for uploading the new work.
T

Unknown said...

Dear Mr. Kooks,
Is it possible to explain to us in a next blog post how you control the brain waves of your human avatar (the named J. Gurney) to make him draw like that?

Kind regards,

Ivo

Aaron said...

Ivo,same way you get to carnegie hall, practice. To James, watching the video and seeing some shots of you painting I notice you seem to work on a smaller scale than a lot of other illustrators, have you always tended to work on the smaller side (in the video, the drawing look like it was 8x10, or maybe 9x12)?

youngstudios said...

wow very jealous james, its my dream to do work with blizzard.

PatternGhost said...

I just got my copy. It has a lot of fantastic work in it.

David Still said...

Dang, that's quite the line-up!