Art Spotlight – Gnolls

Greetings fellow Entrathians! Tyler James here, Art Director for HEX, bringing you some tasty tidbits from our upcoming campaign expansion.

One of the main things the art team focused on in the new zone were dungeons, and with those came a number of opportunities to better explore the races of Entrath. Two of the dungeons feature a race we have shown occasionally thus far, but now have a chance to put into the spotlight.

The gnolls are a race of hyena-like creatures that are scavengers by nature. They wander to new places seeking out cultures to absorb. In the next chapter, you will get a chance to meet the gnolls in two very different forms. The first are the Brutecrown who stumbled upon an ancient human castle and took on the culture devised from the assortment of forgotten relics and architecture remaining.

This castle resided in the highlands of Entrath, with rolling hillsides and majestic mountains. We felt it only appropriate to give them a look that felt reminiscent of Medieval Scotland. You can see in the guide below how we created some initial artwork and concepts along with key text to get the artists all going in the same general direction. I worked with one of our talented in house artists David Pursley to come up with the gnoll style guide (right-click and save as to read all the cool artist notes!).

From there we give individual direction to each artist depending on the details of their assignment. Lucas Parolin worked on some of the boss characters like Vargar.

The second time you encounter the gnolls, you’ll meet the Scraptooth, inhabitants of a desolate graveyard of forgotten dwarven machines.

They are led by Scutt, a ruthless gnoll with a twisted desire to experiment on living subjects. With the Scraptooth, we had so many great opportunities to integrate machinery and dwarven technology into the gnolls. It’s a visual recipe that yields some very tasty results.

Hendry Iwanaga created Scutt’s final look.

Andreas Zafiratos created the final image for the Scraptooth Cyborg. Here he is in all his glory:

We hope you enjoyed this glimpse into some of the exciting new content coming your way with the release of Chapter II. It’s always such a joy to work on new content for all the HEX fans out there.

Until next time, keep on Hexing!

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