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Have you seen the official art for The Murderbot Diaries? It’s pretty great: dynamic and detailed action scenes, with really interesting poses. Like so:

Well I just happened upon an article by Tommy Arnold (the artist) that breaks down his process, and I am amazed to find that these detailed paintings started as poses with a couple buddies in his living room.

The various characters were sometimes posed together, sometimes separately, sometimes with creative camera angles and furniture/props to get things just right. 

Tommy’s the one lying on the floor here.

I won’t copy the whole article over, but it’s really cool. So simple, and so clever. He sketches out his original idea first, then gets reasonably close with the poses, and cobbles everything together in Photoshop to use as reference while he paints.

Look at this awesome picture:

That was real people at one point. Some duplicates, even.

And I am particularly amused to find that Ratthi’s poofy hair was copied directly form the artist’s good buddy Micah Epstein – a fellow illustrator who’s done his own big-name book art and some Magic the Gathering cards.