Lethal Logos: Legend of the Five Rings

That sword took quite a long time to complete. I painted it entirely in Photoshop using a Wacom Intuous graphics tablet. I showed the finished piece to amazing fantasy artist William O'Connor, who thought at first that it was a 3D render.

The scary guy in the middle is the main bad guy from the Enemy of my Enemy story. At the time I made this, I'd been wanting to paint a piece of art for the L5R card game. I came up with the idea of the helmet in the middle of the logo, partly as an excuse to get a painting in the game. Pretty cool way to get EVERY L5R player to see your artwork, eh? :)

We did two logos for the Lotus Edition base set, for storyline and marketing reasons. Legend of the Five rings has an ongoing tournament-based, player-driven story. We created the "Dark Lotus" version of the logo in case an evil Shadowlands character one.

The good guys won, burying my purple logo - UNTIL NOW!
As far as I know, this was the first time we did two logos for an L5R card set.

These were made at the same time as the Lotus logos, for the same reason. It was the last time we did that, because that's a lot of extra work for probably little pay-off. These logos were approved by everybody at the company, except one person who had absolutely nothing to do with marketing, sales, or graphics. They were eventually pushed through, but that's what I remember most when looking at these.

Maybe my favorite L5R logo design. I had a great time painting the wooden dragon statues. I love the lighting in it.

Who would have thought that you could have a house-shaped logo for something OTHER than a real eastate business? I'd been wanting to incorporate a pagoda or some other asian building for a while. I think it works!

Just another opportunity to work illustration into my logos, which I LOVE to do whenever appropriate. Sometimes it just doesn't work. It works here. It's not a clever composition (all Base Set Logos were the same format, for packaging reasons.), so I tried to balance it by making it visually beautiful.

Another L5R sword! Woohoo.