My six year old daughter watched me get the images ready for the previous post and went off with her pens and did her own version of Cthulhu:
(My original:
)
She also did her own version of the plus symbol for the dice design as well:
(My original:
)
Now to get her programming and gaming… 
So I won a competition from dicecreator to get my own custom dice, which rocks. So I spent an afternoon working on the design. I’m sure you’ve seen my the Cthulhu-inspired image on the front of this webpage (and it doubles as my twitter icon) but if not, here it is again.
I thought this might make a cool face on one of the dice, so I went about re-working it a bit, using my trusty lightbox. I’m sure I could have done the re-work on the computer exclusively but I still like to use pencil and pens. It’s more satisfying somehow, at least for me.
I removed the background, filled in his wings which highlighted the tentacles much better. I was keeping in mind how it would look on a small dice.
I wanted “Fudge Dice”. Fudge dice has two faces with plus “+”, two with minus “-” and the final two blank. Keeping the Cthulhu theme, the minus and plus have to be tentacles!
I cheated though, I drew one half of a tentacle and then using my lightbox built up a minus and plus.
But, I won two customised dice and didn’t want to waste the opportunity with just one design! Using some themes from stuff I did for Lost Heroes RPG and the same technique as the tentacles, I came up with theses:
Now with my two designs, I sent them.
And I got the results in my hand right now:
I think they look rather cool myself!
(I’ll write up my initial impressions in another post)
It’s been a while since I did some drawing and this last time I started playing with ink. I’ve used pens before, but this time I was using nibs and brushes. You can see the few exercises I did to the right side there. None of theses took more than a few minutes to do. I was just trying to get a feel for how the ink came out.
I do enjoy using ink. While pencil is my first love when drawing, ink is becoming a firm favourite too. It’s certainly more tricky drawing with a brush or a nib but it’s certainly more satisfying. Pens are solid and black. Brushes and nibs flow and fluctuate their thickness with the speed of your hand. There is a closeness yet detachment with the material. Also, ink scans in so much better. And there is something, simply satisfying by applying big areas of black. It gives the image drama.
