Update
Posted: April 1, 2012 Filed under: art, publishing 1 Comment
I’ve been ignoring the blog because real life has gotten in the way.
I have several projects on my drawing board, most of which I can’t talk about because I don’t know if they have been announced yet. Since Greg Gillespie announced Barrowmaze II, I can mention I have been working on that, plus I am doing stuff for Goodman’s DCC RPG (I think the art for the rulebook is all done; we are now working on ADVENTURES!). Plus there are more than a couple new things that I don’t think have gone public yet, so stay tuned.
I’ve just heard that my the non-profit I work for is laying us off indefinitely because of funding issues. Since I am an ‘independent contractor,’ there is no severance or unemployment compensation, so I have to go back on the job market. I might get called back if the restart the program, but the economic pressure is unwelcome.
For the past 3 days I have been in “layout hell.” The not for profit I work for (which will soon be ‘the not for profit I used to work for’) publishes a newspaper for an underfunded high school in urban Detroit. The last four days have been filled with last minute edits, trying to get people to send in materials, articles, photos, etc., that were due a week ago, trying to fit as much as possible into those pages, answering questions about when the word “captain” is capitalized,* struggling with Adobe InDesign and simultaneously attempting to interpret the wishes of several different people, all of whom have management stake in the project but are seldom in the room at the same time.
In other news, I got my copy of Barrowmaze in the mail yesterday. Haven’t had a chance to do more than flip through it, but it looks great.
*English Major bonus question: “When do you capitalize the word ‘Captain’?” I was asked this question at 9:00 pm last after having worked on the publication for hours and not having a brain cell to spare for a question like this. I answered from my gut. I said that “captain” was capitalized when used as a person’s title (i.e.: “That Captain Jack will get you high tonight,”) and not capitalized when it was simply describing a position (i.e.: “The volleyball team has a captain.”) Was I right?
This is my list
Posted: February 13, 2012 Filed under: art, publishing 4 CommentsIn response to Zak of PD&Dw/P*’s “More of this, please…” post, I offer a few of the images I find interesting or inspiring, chosen (somewhat) at random. These are pictures that have a ‘something’ I like; there are many more (I just snagged a bunch from my ‘good examples’ archive). I didn’t include certain artists already well known to the D&D public (like Trampier, Otus and some others like Rackham) since they would probably be familiar to anyone who reads this blog. And none of these are by me.
I wrote about this last year… in particular, here and here.
I’m not trying to give a last word on this; there is just a lot of great stuff out there.
Barrowmaze Cover Art!
Posted: January 31, 2012 Filed under: art, crass commercialism, publishing 2 CommentsKiltedyaksman over at Discourse & Dragons has just done the ‘reveal’ on his latest publication, so now I can show off the cover art I did:
The publication is ‘The Barrowmaze,” an old school dungeon filled with loads of creepy shit and monsters.
I also did a lot of illustrations for the interior in black and white, including pictures of various foolhardy adventurers about to get their comeuppance and several new monsters. No final word on release date, but the details of printing are being worked out right now so it should hit the boards any day now — head on over to the Yaksman’s and buy two copies! (one for the game table and one for the coffee table)
Sadly, before too long this and all the rest of the artwork gets packed up and shipped to Canada to decorate the domicile of the author. Glad it’s finding a good home but (sniff) they grow up and leave the nest so soon!
Another shameless bit of self promotion…
Posted: January 22, 2012 Filed under: art, crass commercialism, portfolio, project, publishing 9 CommentsI did some art a little while ago for Chaotic Henchmen Productions; the adventure is not out yet but a preview is up here. Anyway, here is the image: a party of dungeoneers about to get reamed by some morlocks and their pet lizard…
And this is what it looks like on the cover:
Carcosa
Posted: January 4, 2012 Filed under: publishing 4 CommentsI don’t buy much gaming stuff at all anymore since I’m much more into the whole “D.I.Y.” aesthetic, but my package containing LotFP’s edition of Geoffrey McKinney’s Carcosa just came from Finland and I’m glad I bought it. It wasn’t cheap, but it’s a beautiful book, quality bound, with a cover that feels like leather/suede. If I only buy a few gaming books a year, I hope they are all this nice.
I’ve flipped through and admired the Rich Longmore illustrations, but since it just arrived last night I haven’t delved into the text yet.
Illustration from the LotFP edition
DCC RPG NEWS
Posted: December 30, 2011 Filed under: art, publishing 1 CommentMost of you have probably heard that Goodman Games is publishing it’s own game called “Dungeon Crawl Classics.” What I didn’t know is that Goodman is allowing other publishers to publish adventures for Dungeon Crawl Classics. Check it at the bottom of this page on the Goodman site:
http://goodman-games.com/dccrpg.html
Full disclosure: I’ve done some illustration work for Goodman Games. But illustrating is a “one time only” kind of deal as far as payment goes — I don’t get paid more if Goodman sells more books with my art in them.
The below drawing has nothing to do with anything other than I think it is old-schooley:
More is better; Who Cares and What is the proper response?
Posted: December 28, 2011 Filed under: douchebaggery, philosophy, publishing, sexuality, weird 20 Comments
Cut and Paste me!
More is better: First things first — I no longer feel obligated to post on every Old School Renaissance event or outrage, but in my web wanderings I frequently come across people expressing the sentiment that when hobbyist gamers sit down to write their ‘own’ rule book, they should write something new and different from what has come before. “Don’t give us another cut-and-paste job!” the masses scream en masse from the internets with the same rage that others reserve for dolphin killers and child molesters.
I think that’s dumb advice. I think if someone sits down to write their own rule book, they should write it exactly the way they want to write it. If that means that the only difference between your new ‘Towers & Trolls‘ and the original game written by Gygax & Arneson is the name and just enough of the text to stave off a cease and desist letter from Wizards of the Coast, then so be it. In the scheme of things, who cares if ‘Towers & Trolls’ sells only 3 copies and never gets played? I’m under the impression most people in the OSR do this for fun and love rather than money… and, for most of us, if we make enough $$$ to buy a pizza and a sixer we can consider it a job well done. Like collecting stamps or building ships inside bottles, rewriting games is a niche hobby.
I realize that producing yet another clone is probably not the winning strategy if your goal is to support yourself by selling games, so the true entrepreneurs who are out to sell books and games in order to make big money might want to avoid tossing yet another undifferentiated clone onto the heap of available games… but the few OSR-ers I’ve met via the internet who are doing this for money already seem to have figured that out, anyway.
One of the reasons why I think this is so cool is I have been reading these posts on A-Plus’s “Outland” game and think it is just the shiznit. I wish I was in his group.
Who Cares?: Paul Jaquays is now a woman named Jannelle Allyn Jaquays (sp?). If you follow that link and read the responses, you will find out that the fact that he is now a she makes some people mad — which is really fucking weird. What are the angry people angry about? I imagine them saying things like, “I played ‘Dark Tower’ back in 1982 and loved it… and Paul Jaquays wrote ‘Dark Tower’ so now I feel like my world has been rocked… how could he betray us by becoming a woman!?!”
One poster wrote something like, “This cannot be true because I know he is a conservative.” I didn’t know there was a single specific conservative viewpoint on gender reassignment. Is there?
I’m reasonably certain Jannelle Allyn Jaquays will not read this, but, if you do, I hope all this works out for you.
If you are one of the people who is made mad by Paul Jaquays becoming Janelle Allyn Jaquays, please post why in comments. I want to know why someone else changing their gender harms you.
What is the proper response?: A few days ago I posted something stupid about new years resolutions and old fruit cakes selling for big money at auction and how I ought to invest in fruit cakes since I could either sell or eat them if worse came to worse. One person responded to tell me something along the lines of, “For your new year’s resolution you could try being less of a douche bag,” or something like that. I deleted the response. In your opinion, what is the proper etiquette in this case?
Mustek A3 1200 USB Scanner
Posted: December 6, 2011 Filed under: art, comics, publishing, technique Leave a comment
I ordered a new Mustek A3 1200 scanner a while ago and it just recently arrived.
There was nothing wrong with my Canon brand scanner other than it’s platen (scanning surface) was too small for most artwork, and, as a result, I had to scan things in pieces and then ‘sew’ them together in Photoshop… which is a time consuming pain. The problem of scanning in pieces is compounded by the fact that you have to keep everything straight… if one of the parts you have scanned is a little off kilter, getting it to match up right is so hard that I discovered it is actually easier to scan the whole thing over again.
The Mustek A3 1200 cost me about $160.00 (I ordered mine from Amazon where the price has also recently gone up (but is still cheaper than Mustek Direct)). The platen is large enough to accommodate a single sheet of ~17×11 inch paper (the size I have been using for my Shaver Comic book). Although the Mustek has a maximum 300 dpi resolution (much lower than the Canon Scanner I had been using), I usually end up reducing to ~63% of original size for reproduction, so the lower dpi of the Mustek becomes irrelevant since, after interpolation down to reproduction size, the Mustek’s scan is still more dpi than I need. For higher resolution scans of photographs and similar items, I’ll still have the Canon, anyway.
Looking at the cost of scanners that can accommodate an a3 size artwork, the Mustek is a bargain. Since it would normally take me at least a half hour to scan and piece together a single page of comic book art using the Canon (and 1/2 and hour assumes nothing goes wrong — other art always takes longer to scan), the Mustek will save me a huge amount of time when you multiply that by many pages. Tests for color and sharpness look fine so far.
This was my x-mas present.
“The Evil Underground: Chapter 2” (slightly nsfw)
Posted: November 30, 2011 Filed under: art, comics, project, publishing, Shaver, underground, weird 7 CommentsLongtime followers of the blog may remember when I presented chapter 1 of a biographical comic book I was working on about the life of Richard S. Shaver (artist, conspiracy theorist, author, paleo-archeologist, philologist and philosopher). If you haven’t yet read it, go back and read chapter 1 before you read chapter 2.
You can click on each page, below, to see a bigger version.
I’m writing the chapters as I go (which may or may not be the best way of going about this; I don’t know). The story is ‘true’ (at least from the narrator’s point of view; objective truth or whether or not Shaver was psycho are not my interest). The next chapter will probably involve Raymond Arnold Palmer and the famous “Mantong” letter.
At the current rate of production, I should have the whole thing done sometime around 2020 or so (sigh). Actually, I hope to have it done sooner, but every project I currently have on the workbench is unfinished and I’m getting a bit psycho feeling over not getting any single one done. Evil Underground/Richard Shaver Comic will come out sometime after I finish ‘Exquisite Corpses’ v2… which should be sometime early next year (I hope).
Some 2011 color Artwork for XRP Press
Posted: November 15, 2011 Filed under: art, publishing 2 CommentsI just got back into town the other day and am still trying to get caught up, so I thought I would post some stuff I did for XRP Press earlier this year. There are 4 artworks (front cover and back) for “Down the Shadowvein” and “In the Mouth of the Shadowvein” by Joseph Browning. Previews of the covers are here.
I don’t think either of these are in print yet (I haven’t gotten my copies yet) but are due out soon. XRP promises that these are possible followups to “The Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom” (which I also did cover art for).
