As part of winning these custom dice, I have to do a review of them. However I haven’t gamed in months, certainly not since I received the dice. So instead I’m doing a “part 1” of the review now, which is, in a sense, a bit weird as it’s my design on the dice! Part 2 will come when I actually get to game.

My Fudge Dice

So in lieu of not actually gaming with them, I grabbed my big bag of dice and compared them to my other fudge dice. I bought a set of 16 dice from Grey Ghosts years ago. Comparing them physically the dice are all the same size. Of course my new dice are printed rather than engraved like my current fudge dice. Just rolling them randomly on the table together I notice no difference in them.

Visually there is certainly no problem in picking out pluses and minus when you roll a bunch together. In fact I think it’s easier, the pluses and minuses on the printed dice are bigger, check out the slightly fuzzy photo below:

I think though that my little Cthulhu icon on the blank side feels quite contracted on the dice compared to the other sides. But that may be an artefact of the design more so than the dice itself. However the quality of the print is impressive. The detail is quite vivid (though you may not be able to tell from my bad photography).

The original design, in case you've forgotten!

Certainly if you wanted to get some icon on a dice, this would be a be a great way to do it.

I’ve rubbed them and rolled them, and so far, none of the print has come off. So it seems quite sturdy. I have been keeping them in my big bag of dice these last few months and no damage to the print at all from being tossed about.

Overall I’m quite happy with them, hopefully they’ll prove to be my “lucky” dice. I think they’ll be kina cool too if I go to cons with them, though I’m generally not big into showing off my geek status. I managed to meet up with my roleplaying group and showed them the dice, which got a good “ah cool!” from everyone. So that’s a decent objective measure there.

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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…

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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)

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[singlepic id="90" w="100" h="240" mode="" float="right" ]
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.

As an exercise I did this “Decorative Cthulhu”. I’ve been doodling images of Cthulhu during meetings for weeks now and the image came out rather nice after you scan it in. I might even use it for an icon for my avatar, replace that old chesire cat. I had intended to highlight the glossy nature of the deep black eye with some white ink but as I was setting up for that, I spilt water all over the paper. There was some slight smudging but it doesn’t really show in the scan.

I also did this pencil sketch of my baby son from a bad photo I took. It came out all right but I get the feeling it would work better if I use charcoal. I’ll probably be re-visiting this image in the future. There is also some weird quality added to the image during the scanning process, looks like the paper was all crinkled or something.

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