World of WarCrafts: Wowatar fills in the lines
by Lisa Poisso 
Jul 6th 2009 at 4:00PM
World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself by contacting our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) -- not-for-profit work only, please.
Getting started can be the most difficult step for WoW newbies and WoW "WarCrafters" alike. Showing your artwork to other people – or even having the gumption to create any in the first place – can be intimidating stuff. Discovering someone who's willing to show you how it's done or even share his creative process represents a major inspirational coup. Swedish WoW player Jonas at wowatar.com is one of those creative wellsprings. He's created a small drawing site filled with WoW-related nuggets that inspire, instruct and delight.
"I'm a struggling artist and illustrator and a dedicated World of Warcraft player," he writes to World of WarCrafts. "I've tried to combine those two into making drawings of creatures from the game. I've been playing WoW for about two and a half to three years, I think. At the moment I'm mostly focused on WoW, but I also do some Star Wars drawings."Jonas launched wowatar.com with the idea of creating pencil sketches of player avatars. " This idea changed almost immediately, since drawing monsters in the game offered more variety," he explains on his site. "Now I only draw player avatars if someone ask me to."
Jonas doesn't keep all that creativity to himself. He's generous with his ideas and experience, using his site to help newbies get a leg up and start sketching. A drawing tutorial covers materials, preparation, sketching, shading, highlights, details and cleaning the edges. Time lapse videos take you behind the scenes and see exactly what those techniques look like in action.
Like what you see? Jonas offers a page of WoW-related desktop artwork in standard resolutions. Scoop one up to inspire your own WoW-inspired artwork – and don't forget to share them with us at World of WarCrafts!
Coming soon in World of WarCrafts: an entirely fresh sound build for Stratholme, plus My Little Lich King (yes, it's what you think!).
World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself by contacting our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) -- not-for-profit work only, please.Filed under: Fan stuff, Features, World of WarCrafts
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
S?hrtogg Jul 6th 2009 4:16PM
Very nice video. At 0:50 the goblin suddenly 'becomes alive'. Kudos to the artist: as realistic as a fantasy figure can get.
Jillemixie Jul 6th 2009 5:30PM
You wrote Jonas instead of Jason at the end...
Anywho,
Those are some sweet sketches!
Jillemixie Jul 6th 2009 5:32PM
Opps. He's actually Jonas. I guess auto-correct (or an editor) must have made it Jason.
Lisa Poisso Jul 6th 2009 7:10PM
Oh, yuck -- thanks for letting us know so we could fix that!
kate Jul 6th 2009 7:04PM
Call me a party-pooper, but I don't really appreciate people who put their own copyright on what is essentially a pencil sketch of someone else's artwork.
e.g. The orc on the front page of that site and in the gallery (where it bears his own copyright mark) is from an official wallpaper:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/downloads/wallpapers/images/orc-icon/orc-icon-1600x.jpg
The mouth is closed in his sketch, and he's added a foot - otherwise it's identical.
At least credit the original artist if you're doing a derivative work.
kokigomi Jul 6th 2009 7:41PM
what a stupid website to have on wow.com this was most certainly a facepalm try harder next time
Tretton Jul 7th 2009 9:26AM
One of my guildies also does awesome hand-drawn wow pictures, but they're in ink and really really detailed (and custom made).
She also did a sweet timelapse video - check it out! www.lhyart.com
Tretton Jul 7th 2009 11:15AM
Live link :P
http://lhyart.com/
Gath Jul 7th 2009 11:03AM
This video seems like it takes the artist an awful longass time to complete the goblin, I used to work at Dark Horse Comics and used to color 5 to 6 pages per day to everyone elses 2 to 3, I can draw ten times faster than this artist..and now that I have this link here, I'll prove to all the world MUHAhahaaaaa!!!!
azron
Anetheron > the long extended maintainance realm of today
here's a link to some ...of my stuff
i even have my own rendition of DeathDealer meets WOW
http://www.stormpages.com/deathdealer/index.html
I even made the entire free site, which basically houses ...some, of my work and in now way reflects the actual full extent of my talent.
Axilla Jul 24th 2009 4:51PM
You could at least pretend to make your shitty site and stolen drawings look legit.
http://www.frazettaartgallery.com
Sorry about your wife though!