We're continuing our new regular series here on Untoldthegame.com; it's one that will give a bit of insight into how our awesome artists go about doing their inspiring work and will hopefully delight your eyes along the way. It's called "Concept-7", because we're going to expose some of our concept work to you (to let you see what's coming down the pipe for Untold) by asking the artist who did the piece 7 questions about that piece in particular.

We hope you find it engaging and interesting! Please let us know what you think by posting a comment or responding in our forums -- we'd love to hear from you!

This week, we're getting a super sneak preview of some concept art from an upcoming Power Card for Untold. It's a Power that's well known to most RPG'ers and it's called "Grapple". Basically, it's the ability to grab someone and hold onto them; we gave this iconic Power to one of our newest artists to illustrate. A charming fellow by the name of Moshik Gulst, who contacted us out of the blue no less! (There's a lesson in that for all you would-be illustrators - NOTHING VENTURED, NOTHING GAINED!)

Early on, we'd decided to have all of our Power Card art to feature our iconic characters, and we selected Barnabus, the second High-bred we ever created, for this particular Power. Here's the Art Direction, or AD, that we sent over to Moshik:

"Barnabus grapples with a copy of himself. We need to see that the "Evil Barnabus" is just that – obviously evil (red irises, pointed teeth, etc.). The "Good Barnabus" is behind the "Evil Barnabus" and has the "Evil Barnabus" in a choke hold. We can see that the "Good Barnabus" is straining to hold his twin in check while he reaches with his other hand towards a holstered pistol."

And here are the questions!

Q1. Regarding this piece, how did you come about your initial design?
A1. Well, the basic design for the character was already done but I tried to emphasize the "desert-ish" feeling of the character. I'm from the middle east so it wasn't that hard (j/k). This card deals with the same character but from different perspective of morality and I didn't want to do the good and bad versions too far from each other so I took the color as the main difference between them

Q2. What or who inspired you for this piece?
A2. That's a question that it's always hard for me to answer because I usually don't take inspiration from something exclusively but I think the illustrations come as a mixture of old and new stuff that runs in my head over the years. So right now I have on the shelf some old Joe Madureira stuff, Tomer Hanuka and Ashley Wood. I guess that's the closest thing to inspiration although I'm not sure you can see it in the illustration itself. When I colored it I noticed it reminded me a little Jim Steranko style, so I guess you can add that also to the mixture.

Q3. What do you think is the best part of this piece; what is its most striking or impressive element?
A3. I liked the faces of the struggling characters and the black ink that is increasing it. Also I like the hands of the good Barnabus - they are big and muscular and it emphasize the struggle.

Q4. How do you hope this piece will make your audience feel?
A4. "Where is my little brother? There's something I need to show him…"

Q5. If you could change one element of this concept, what would it be?
A5. Doing the bad Barnabus a lot scarier, twisted and terrifying, but then again he will be hard to be recognized as the bad side of himself on this one-shot.

Q6. What medium did you use for this piece and what drove that selection?
A6. Pen and ink for the B/W and digital color painting. the black ink was chosen to give dramatic expression and mood and the color was influenced by Jim Steranko thing that turned up in my mind, as I mentioned before.

Q7. How long did this piece take you to compete?
A7. Well I'm not sure because I didn't work on the illustration in one step. I guess a day's work.

And the finished piece:

We're very thankful that Moshik was able to sit down with us for our November Concept-7 interview. Moshik's a very busy guy who's WOW'ed us with his broad and varied styles and talents. He's done with his short stint with Wandering Men Studios and Untold for now, but rest assured that he'll be back! Once he's done with his current big project, he's promised to come back and do some more awesome work for us!

We're looking forward to that, suren, but in the meantime, be sure and keep tabs on what Moshik's up to by visiting his blog, checking out and befriending his Flickr page, and (if you read Hebrew) reading his weekly web-comic, entitled, "A Seconde Before It Spills!"

As you can see, Moshik is one talented and busy guy! We're honored to know him and have his work as a part of Untold history! If you want to see even more of Moshik's awesome art, be sure and subscribe to our newsletter - you'll be seeing more of his stuff inside!