Joee Abbott

 Chronicles of Major Arcana: Wild Magic | Concept Art for a Dungeons & Dragons Campaign

I’d known what I’d wanted to do for my BFA for a long time--since Freshman year. The tricky part now was how was I supposed to make other people care about what I had to show them?

What did I want people to ultimately take away from my BFA?

For most it’s easier to conceptualize video games as a form of entertainment in contrast to games that are analog. In response, I have developed concept art for a home-brewed Dungeons and Dragons campaign I am a part of to express my main thesis of my case study—that just because there are no direct physical media elements, this doesn’t negate the experience of enjoyment and investment (and, let’s face it, escapism) table top games has to offer.

I want to show how unique the campaign and the characters are--how collectively everyone in the group built a part of the story from scratch and how that story has grown with us, and more specifically me. It’s almost poetic that I was introduced into this D&D campaign right before college, and that I have the opportunity to use that same campaign to represent my BFA, to show how much I have grown as a person and artistically alongside this campaign and the characters within it.

This project from conceptualization to final iteration took 5 months and was completed using Photoshop, InDesign, and Clip Studio Paint.

What’s Major Arcana?

Major Arcana is the name of my group's adventuring party within our DM’s world, on a continent called Meakanu. The overarching story is pretty standard for campaigns: an adventuring group that collectively shares one brain cell tries to save Meakanu from doom and destruction. Trying to encompass our entire campaign would be an amazing feat that one person could not complete in less than 15 weeks, so the idea of The Chronicles of Major Arcana is to separate our adventures out into segments, this segment being titled Wild Magic, which encompasses our first big adventure as a group. Including our DM, there are six of us in total, and although we all have very different personalities, I really could not ask for a better D&D group to represent my BFA.

Because of quarantine many D&D groups had to go digital—something not very common up until last year. This project provided me with the opportunity of expanding on one of the resources many players use called D&D Beyond. Here, I have mocked up what using emoticons as reactions within the site would look like, providing a more interactive experience for the players, even if they aren’t all in the same room.

Research and Process

Moodboards / Thumbnails / Sketching / Base Colors and Shades / Digital Painting / Lighting Touch Up’s