Artist Spotlight: Lindsey Crummett’s Slag Slug

Lindsey Crummett knows her way around a creature. During a decade at Weta Workshop, she contributed to projects including The Hobbit trilogy and the Avatar films. For Sorcery: Contested Realm, her next subject was a little closer to the ground…at least in theory.

The brief called for “a large lava slug in smoldering ruins.” Lindsey had her own interpretation of “large.”

“Funny enough my brain just translated that to ENORMOUS!” Lindsey recalls. “After my first image sent to Erik of the slug towering above a building, he had to rein me in a bit. Ok, maybe not that big… haha.”

With the scale reined in by Sorcery creator, Erik Olofsson, Lindsey set about creating a creature that could still make a viewer feel very small. Here, she shares the sketches, references, and painting process behind her Slag Slug.

In Its Path

Lindsey began with small pencil thumbnails, experimenting with compositions that would work both as a full painting and within the confines of a Sorcery card.

“I often start with tiny thumbnail sketches that probably make sense to no one but me,” she says. “I’ll often do several, before I land on one I like best.”

Her first idea was a slug exploring the wreckage it had left behind, completely oblivious to the destruction.

“The first thing I visualized was this beast of a slug poking around in the remnants of the ruins it created. Thoughtlessly, like the way you might see one crawling on a carcass, unaware of any emotional impact.”

Making the slug feel enormous without having it tower over buildings took some adjustment. Lindsey exaggerated the curves of its body to emphasize its length and chose a low viewpoint to make the viewer feel small.

She also made sure the creature was looking directly at us.

“And of course, when something is dangerous, you never want it looking right at you!” she adds. “So that’s exactly what it’s doing, to escalate the feeling of danger.”

For the setting, Lindsey studied photographs of smoldering ruins. She wanted the surroundings so thoroughly destroyed that they were almost unrecognizable. The rubble needed enough detail to draw the viewer's eye through the painting, but not so much that it distracted from the slug.

Lava and Slug Skin

While studying photographs of lava flows, Lindsey began noticing similarities between hardened lava and the skin of real slugs.

“Sometimes the patterns of hardened black lava rock forming on top of the liquid orange lava actually reminded me of the skin patterning of slugs when you look at them with macro photography.”

“This felt like a great opportunity to combine those two elements, and it was a lot of fun to explore.”

She particularly enjoyed working on the creature's face and the glowing lava beneath it. “I think I was having too much fun with that gooey specularity and hot lava effect.”

From Pencil to 3D to Paint

Before putting paint to paper, Lindsey tried something a little different. She built a digital sculpture of the slug to help work out its lighting and texture.

“I actually sculpted the slug with a 3D program this time,” she says. “I don’t always do this, but I knew it would be a quick sculpt, and I could get some interesting lighting and specularity information that would be wonderful to reference while painting.”

With the model as a reference, Lindsey returned to traditional painting. The process photographs show the creature emerging from broad areas of yellow and purple, as she gradually built up the dark curves of its body, the glowing lava, and the surrounding wreckage.

Looking at the finished piece, Lindsey is particularly happy with the way the composition keeps drawing her eye back to the creature's face.

“I think my favorite thing about this piece is how my eye travels around the painting, but I always get sucked right back into that high contrast face, with its antennae leading you right back to the center. So that makes me feel like it’s a successful composition.”

You can find Lindsey Crummett’s Slag Slug in Frost Mage vs. Lavamancer, debuting November 13th world wide. Find out more about Lindsey here.