📢 Hey everyone! We would like to make a quick announcement at the top of this update. The Streaming Embargo on Tales of Fablecraft will lift on May 1, 2024. We can't wait to see some of you running sessions out in the wild.
In this week's update, we will be spotlighting one of Tales of Fablecraft's incredible artists, Linda Lithén. We got a chance to see some of Linda's latest work in a previous update. This week, we'll talk to Linda herself and learn more about her creative process!
Name: Linda Lithén
Socials: artstation.com/darantha
Location: Sweden
Artistic superpower: The tasty little details.
Interests beyond painting: Gaming and writing, also baking / cooking to satisfy the stomach’s needs.
Couldn't live without: Tea. I run on it, much to my dentist’s chagrin.
Favorite ice cream flavor: I like fruit flavours, like lemon or banana. Or something w/ chocolate chips in it.
Our Creative Director, Darci Manley, gives a more in depth look at the art brief process and the joys of working with Linda. You can peek behind the scenes of the design work in this week's video update!
Linda Lithén has many artistic superpowers, which makes it tough to pick what we are most in awe of. It could be her gorgeous and intricate details (a hallmark of any Linda creation). Or perhaps it’s the speed at which she can take a brief to final picture (seriously, she’s FAST).
It might be the fantastical creatures she often adds to her character designs (everything is better with an animal buddy!). And then of course there’s the vibrancy and storytelling she brings to anything she designs. Luckily we don’t have to choose! Players will have the opportunity to meet many of Linda’s NPC characters and play as several of them as well.
Can you tell us a bit about how you came to be a professional artist?
LINDA: It took a couple of years after college, but it was either continuing to kick around at unemployment busywork events while trying to compete with all recent graduates for low-paying jobs, or just registering as my own business owner.
LINDA: I did some smaller jobs for self publishing authors and a few Power Rangers comic covers early on, but when Critical Role published their first book together with Wizards of the Coast, they brought in a lot of artists from the CR community, and that’s how I managed to sort of wedge my foot in the door. A lot of ADs seemed to find me through my Critical Role fanart at first. So, to be honest I think I was just in the right place at the right time.
Who are your biggest artistic influences?
LINDA: I don’t know if I can name specific artists as general media. I remember trying to mimic the W.I.T.C.H. covers and media when I was young, and one of my childhood memories is lying on the bed in our caravan during summer vacation, copying the drawings in the Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos manual. Warcraft remained a fairly big influence as I played WoW during my teens, along with other anime influences like One Piece and Naruto, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy.
What are your main sources of inspiration?
LINDA: My fellow artists keep me pushing myself, haha. Got to learn to live with that “Oh man, I could never paint like that” to “Ok time to just try and aim higher with the next painting” emotional swing. But I also get inspiration from games that I play, and I like taking in various art styles as inspiration.
LINDA: For example, I’m currently bouncing between Elden Ring, Genshin Impact, Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV, and I try to follow artists from outside of the TTRPG/MtG fantasy art style bubble so I have something new I can try to parse and feed into my own style.
Can you walk us through your process when working on Fablecraft artwork, from brief through to final execution?
LINDA: The briefs I get are always so great and leave me with a fantastic base to build from, so I usually start with just thinking about what sort of character it’s supposed to be, what the brief says about them and how they live. Then I do some thumbnail sketches with very basic design elements in them and send them off for review.
LINDA: After that one thumbnail has been selected, I do a cleaner sketch of it with basic colours. I am not good at lines, so my sketches are fairly rough, because I just merge them down into the base colours when I start painting.
LINDA: If everything looks good, I will then do a first pass on everything. In cases like the woven grass cloaks for the Longstriders like Delphine here, I will go looking for references like woven baskets and other decorations and work it up to a point where it looks ok and reads well, without getting too bogged down in the details. This is usually the point where we discuss tweaks to the art piece, like if the facial features need to be changed.
Once everything has been worked out and everyone’s happy with how the process image looks, I do a finishing pass and clean up edges and add more details and textures.
How would you personally define success as an artist?
LINDA: I believe success is what you yourself define it as. In a social climate where ‘monetize your hobby’ is so prevalent, I am a ardent believer in that success as a artist can be anything from “I mostly draw my favourite fandom ship for my 200 followers on tumblr” to “I just got hired to work on this high budget show/AAA-game.
Any advice for aspiring artists out there?
LINDA: If you don’t know how something looks, use references. It’s not cheating. And study your fundamentals!
Check out more of Linda’s work on Tales of Fablecraft, join our party on Discord, and Wishlist us on Steam today!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2176900/Tales_of_Fablecraft/?utm_source=steam&utm_content=042924-steam-update-linda-lithen