Owen William Weber Illustration

Hello Again, So this time I will be showing the process of painting the latest card of mine that has been released.  The new Lord of the Rings LCG expansion pack from Fantasy Flight Games, "The Road Darkens", has become available, which has my "Leaf-Wrapped Lembas" card. When I received the assignment, around this time last year, I was immediately excited.  I had been wanting a good excuse to do a highly detailed bread still-life, in the tradition of 18th c. Spanish painters like Luis Meléndez.  I then researched what Tolkien was intending his Lembas bread to be similar to; it turns out he was thinking of Bannock bread.  Luckily enough, I told my wife about this, and she instantly whips out her obsession: Yvette van Boven 's Cookbook, Homemade Winter .  She has a great recipe for Bannock bread.  So we quickly fried the bread that night; fried, because it is cooked on a pan over the burners.  It looked great, I was quite happy with the outcome o...

The Golem of Prague , 12"x 16", Oil on Paper on Masonite, 2013. Back in August, at Gen Con Indy, I was approached by a man who was starting a book called "Lands and Legends".  It is a book of illustrations based on various myths, legends and fantastic places, from all cultures around the world.  I was saying yes to his pitch in no time.  There was already a huge list of amazing illustrators involved and he had a great financial plan for this book that would involve a Kickstarter campaign.  He had a list of ideas for various subjects that would meet his criteria, as I glossed over the list, "The Golem of Prague" jumped out at me and my mind was made up that this was my subject matter.  The Golem has been a subject I have wanted to paint since I came back from Prague four years ago.  I went to a service in the Old New Synagogue (depicted in the background of the painting) with my Wife and Father-In-Law, knowing full well that what was left...

Mantra 2, 18" x12", Oil on Masonite, 2013. I finished this painting a while back, but never got around to photographing it until recently.  this is another piece in my ongoing "Mantra series".  The idea behind the series is to do various free floating still-lives, and make them as dream-like as possible.  They're given black backgrounds and I do many dark glazes over the detailed painting to push it into the black as much as necessary.  This is an image of a flint stone and the fire it creates.  It is meant to be a mantra of our origins as homo sapiens and the evolution that occurred after the discovery of the magic this rock can create.  I don't have this series completely mapped out yet, it's still evolving itself.  I hope to do five of them, but who knows.  I'd like to keep them as images of natural objects, but I'm not sure if that matters.  I'll paint them as they come to me.