Neat, Dînadan! Made me think of Artigas' take on Blacklocks in Tolkien's Middle Earth:







Also, drew some columns:

Two evil looking Dwarves I came across...

Sweet!

Not sure if these have come up before, but in case they haven’t, just stumbled across this gallery on DA:

https://knightinflames.deviantart.com/ga...arfs-WH-FB

The highly talented Raul Gomes (t5p1ny) is a CDO member, see this thread.

Added all the Artisan's Contest XXIII entries to the first page compilation. Every artist is invited to post their image here as well, and elaborate on it if they wish.

As for mine, it's based upon a Babylonian tower but with sloping sides (slight lightning bolt-resemblance). Equipped with swivel guns and a movable signal mirror with brazier on top for relaying semaphore messages to neighbouring watchtowers and mechanized war caravans in the surroundings. Armoured door requires a ladder to reach from the ground, or something high such as an Iron Daemon train stopping by. It's just a simple flat-from-the-side view, no perspective involved. If I were to redo it, I'd add some riveted iron bands with larger spikes to its corners and flat wall sides to up the Chaotic impression:

This post was last modified: 12-15-2017 06:51 AM by Admiral.

Here’s my entry for Artisan’s XXIII:





As I mentioned in the comp announcement thread, I don’t feel like it adequately conveys the various features I envisioned for it, but I didn’t have the energy to do proper schematics for it, but I do have a couple of rough sketches I did at the time which I can post now with annotations to explain things:





The idea is that the tower is built around machinery for pumping magma which is used for several of its features.
1) the first feature is a signalling device.  This is a set of four twelves-sided blocks stacked atop one another (there is one set of blocks in each side of the tower), with a different symbol on each side of the block; see the third pic for a ‘list’ of the twelve symbols.  They’re controlled by levers on the level above; a signalman watches through binoculars, looking at the next tower ready to read their signals and/or relay signals back.  Idea is there’s a network of these towers throughout the Dark Lands.
2) the second feature is four lamasuu gargoyles (one per side).  If attackers are in danger of breaching a gate the defenders can open the flow and pour magma out onto them.
3) at the base of the steps and at each level on the steps there are vent that can vent flames out under the feet of any attackers that reach that point.

For non-magma based defences:
1) each level has a number of firing slots from which the defenders can fire on attackers.
2) inside instead of conventional floors there is a ‘chasm’.  Idea behind this is that if attackers breach the gates, they have to fight their way all the way down to the ground and then all the way back up, the intention being to allow the signalmen to keep working as long as possible.  The outer ‘rings’ have no wall/baulistrade along their chasm side whereas the inner ‘rings’ do, that way the defenders have cover while the attackers don’t.

Another sketch I did the other day:

The Order of Things





The idea is it’s a monument/sculpture depicting the order of Chaos Dwarf society; at the top is Hashut, then the Sorcerers and Overlords, then the regular Dawi Zharr, then the hobgoblins and finally the slaves.

Two evil looking Dwarves I came across...

Holy crap!!! This is epic!

The Wandering Tower of the Mad Inventor Kadzak Teg'melech

The last invention of the Mad Inventor Kadzak Teg'melech was a brilliant re-visualization of the common border watchtower.  Teg'melech envisioned a fortification that could patrol itself, carrying the border unit, and thereby providing much needed protection from the terrible threats that prowl the northern chaos wastes.  

The tower itself was a massive construction of stone and steel. The components magically congealed using lost and clever artifice so that it would not disintegrate under the jarring vibration of it's weighted, noisome, juddering steps.

The construct's engine was a bound K'daai of fearsome size who's living furnace provided unceasing power to the massive pistons and steam works driving the behemoth.

While a novel concept, the proof thereof was less than satisfactory. The poor souls doomed to be assigned to the tower were banged and bumped, and vibrated to jelly, a slow, painful, calamitous internal degeneration from the constant pounding of the machine's gait.

The result was that the tower became the most dreaded post in the entire waste, a slow sentence to guaranteed death or insanity.  Only the worst of criminals, slaves, and societal outcasts who simply failed too miserably and obviously in their machinations toward power, were assigned there as penance.  The culmination of the towers record was a fateful night wherein the towers overseer, his mind sundered into tortured shards from from 18 months of crushing tread... somehow managed to circumvent the safeguards on the infernal machine's engine.  The K'daai, ecstatic to retaliate against the pain of it's binding, blasted out in a superheated furnace of destruction. The tower's occupants were incinerated in place, and the flare was seen for miles around.  Alas, the towers construction was so meticulous that despite the breach, the core bindings remained in place, and the tower continued on; it's skillfully wrought machinery grinding endlessly across the blasted landscape.

It is said that there were many initial attempts to regain the tower, but the engine itself succumbed to madness and all who breached it's walls were destroyed.  The marvel itself has faded to mere legend, though travelers tales abound of strange and fearful encounters.   On certain nights, the light of the stars bleed down into the chaos below, and a giant walking tomb trundles with titanic crab-like steps, to and fro across the landscape, on it's doomed and ceaseless mission.

----------
Ahem... Run-on sentence much?  As the contest was announced I got the idea to make a walking or wandering tower even before I finished reading through the announcement.  Ideas for the fluff that ultimately ended up above were already popping into my head.  The initial sketch looked very close to the final:



The artwork itself is wax pencil ('prismacolor' brand which are common in the US) on 'Canson' paper (that is the brand again and there is probably another name for it that I cannot think of) which is basically like fine quality construction paper with texture on one side.  The texture can be used to bring out the detail.  I first laid out the core lines in a light grey and moved on from there:



Below is the artwork as posted to the contest:



I really struggled to get a good shot and much of the detail was lost trying to keep the color good across the image.  The below close-up shows some of the detail missing from the full shot.  The shot is kind of washed out, but it does show the detail and brick work better than the final:



Cheers,

This post was last modified: 12-18-2017 12:39 PM by Jackswift.

Now that is certainly interesting.

This will sound weird but the part I like this most? The lava! It flows really well.

That`s really cool !
Did you try to scan the image? Maybe this isn`t perfect, too, but the lighting would be good distributed over the picture.

Ooooh, you know now that you point it out it does have a really great sense of motion!

Really well done