thedeadone.net » ink

My first RPG map

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:30:40 +0000

Inspired by fictitious entry’s posts on maps and geomorphs and some of the maps done by Dyson Logos, I decided to try my hand at doing an RPG map.

Here it is:

There are lots of little mistakes, I should have left more space at the top to do the church more fully and I scaled the “portal” at the bottom much bigger then I intended and… But who cares really. Normally my art projects require several iterations, references pieces, building ideas, etc. I did this in one sitting. Pencil to pen, very little sketching or references. And that was fun. It’s great to be able to do just draw. My kids draw like that. My son will draw a line and I’ll ask him, “what are you drawing?”, “I don’t know yet”. Same with this map, I started with the church and worked down. It’s like a mini-story, dead-end here, secret passage that the cultists use there and so on.

Of course, not that map couldn’t be done up as a proper art project. You just have to look at someone like Fantastic Maps to see how beautiful maps can be.

I then saw this article about recently discovered 1,800 year old tunnels under a temple in Mexico. All I could think was, this would make a great idea for a dungeon map!

Final renderings and access to an A3 scanner!

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 20 May 2011 09:13:28 +0000

So this is the final rendering of the “Meave” image I asked people to vote on last week. Because there wasn’t a clear consensus, I just mixed the two, some in front, some in back. It’s not perfect. It’s still quite tilted to the right, but I’m happy with it.

I also discovered my work has a A3 scanner. It only scans in at 300 dpp but that’s not too bad. So I re-scanned my “Matthew” image.

There is a distinct similarity in the two pictures, which I’m going to have to break with the next one!

New Lost Heroes Image: Renegade Chosen Matthew

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:30:29 +0000

If you’ve been following me on twitter (or sharing with me on Diaspora), you’ll probably have seen the work-in-progress photos of this image. It took me about 8 hours to do this. I suspect I could have done it in less time if I could have done it in one sitting, but I don’t have that luxury. I quite like it, it’s in theme and concept with my original idea.

I think I’ve come a long way in the last few years in terms of my drawings. I now approach an image as a project, which includes multiple iterations, design considerations, foundation work, etc. And this one was no different. I had a character designed from my Lost Heroes RPG project (I’m currently working on the rules a bit) and I wanted to do a new character image.

So this is Matthew, a Renegade Chosen. His body and face are covered in scars where he pulled himself together in the Void. His knife is actually the remains of a sword that he created while in the Void. It burned and melted away as he cut his way back to Earth. The knife allows him to make quick short trips into the Void and travel instantaneously to other places. However there is a darkness to his power, a manifestation of his power in the Void, a shadow.

Initial design stage

One of the early stabs at layout

When coming up with the image design, I did sketch out some concepts, and figure out what the character should look like. I used a number of manga/anima books that I have as reference. They are clean sharp images. This allowed me to jump to the next stage and create a clean outline of the character.

But then came the power of the lightbox, my favourite piece of drawing equipment (besides pencils and pens). I created Matthew’s shadow and played around with placement of the “portal” and the shadow. Once I knew that worked, it pretty much started to fall into place.

Originally the shadow held a version of the sword that was complete, but the placement of it, looked bad. So I left it out. It’s nice how the image evolved though. This was the last stage before I started adding some shade:

If I had a graphics tablet I could probably do more of these stages online and tidy up the image better, but I do enjoy using a pen or a pencil on paper.

Now back to actually doing some writing!

Some new art work: Meave and Dead Eyes

Mark Cunningham — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 21:38:53 +0000

When I uploaded the photos from my five-year-old daughter’s digital camera, I found some shots that managed to capture unexpected looks and expressions on people. I was so taken by at least one I decided to work up an image.

I was also partly inspired by the character “Meave” that I created in my mind for this little piece of fiction for my Lost Heroes RPG project. Here’s the relevant two paragraphs:

The young emo-goth Meave sits by herself in the school cafeteria. She numbly rubs at the healed scars on her wrists. The other kids just ignore her today. This is a good day for her. …

Meave will see her father, the god Dagda, in the distance watching her. She will run from him, run as hard as a princess of worlds that don’t exist can run. And the crows will screech through the sky after her.

During the process I ended up branching and producing a second more creepy character (which I’ve been referring to as “deadeyes”). Anyway, here are the two completed images:

(Which one works best do you think?)

The one thing I’m learning in any of my creative endeavours; writing, drawing and even programming, is that you learn so much by working through the process from beginning to end and it greatly improves the basic fundamental skills. And the stuff I did during the process, I think, is nearly as good as the end result.

I’ve been tinkering a lot with my drawing process. For a start I didn’t use a scanner. Instead I photographed them with a digital camera and use the photos. This preserves the textures and tones much better than using a scanner. You can see this in the original pencil drawing here.

But there is a catch which I’ve noticed. The shape of the lens of the camera “bends” the drawing. It’s not perfectly to shape, there is a slight distortion. But I think it pays off in terms of the quality of the image.

It was the expression that really captured my imagination and those big lips. I’ve been told I got a good likeness of the person in the photo, however I’m not going to be uploading it here so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

I already had the end image composition in my mind, but I needed a good background. I grabbed several reference images from my photo collection and developed this of a murder of crows. The image is good enough stand-alone I think.

I had originally intended this to be a silhouette only, pure black. I used ink with brushes and black markers and I ended up giving it some texture, which really worked. Then, for good measure, I used charcoal to give it that rising tint you get at twilight. Again I photographed it to keep the texture (it was also on an A3 page so my A4 scanner is too small). And once I had the images on the computer I could start playing around with composition:

Prototype of background and character

I then printed out a series of the character study to see how I could “enhance” it:

(You can see where I came up with the dead-eyes concept)

My first stab at moving the sketch to ink was atrocious (and I’m not uploading it here!). So I pass the sketch through some filters on the computer and got out a raw black and white version and I used this as the basis of the first run. I thought it looked cool, though I think part of the expression got lost (but the ratio of the head to body seemed to improve, or had you not noticed that it was off?).

Having everything set up, I just ran with it and dug up the second character visualisation:

Initially I thought it came out better, but looking at the final two pieces, it was simply different but just as good.

Once all the pieces were in place, it was just a matter of getting them into the computer and arranging them in some image editor. I did play around with a lot of the funky effects you can do in software, but I felt they didn’t add to the final image. I think such effects work better if you’re colouring the images.

Both images work, though they each have a different feel. Certainly the “deadeyes” one is more creepy, but the first is closer to my original vision. I learned lots doing this one, and I have a few other projects/ideas I want to do. I may even use this image in Lost Heroes RPG: Book of Gods, you’ll just have to wait and see.

I’m back two weeks already? My my my…

Mark Cunningham — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:14:04 +0000

This is what three weeks looks like

Two weeks on and I’m still lacking much motivation. Things are getting up to speed though, shortly my daughter will be going back to school signifying the end of the summer and the routine will dramatically change again and in work, all our customers have returned from their holidays and have started dumping crap on us again. And it’s taken me two weeks to just sit down to write this post. Shouldn’t really take that much, but energy and focus have been lacking. I guess the dull weather since getting home has putting on a drain, especially when we had such lovely weather on holidays.

(More pics and drawings after the break)

He was so tired, he just fell asleep outside

When I was on holidays, despite only get one true sleep-in (as in I wasn’t woken by the kids at 7am, my wife and myself took turns getting up to take care of the weeks) and despite the weather not being gorgeous all the time, I was rather productive. I wrote three new short stories. They are currently sitting on my laptop awaiting editing, but it was fun to just write and they are rather short. I will eventually get them up online, if you care to read them. I also spent a huge amount of time working on my Lost Heroes RPG: Book of the Gods. In total I wrote 27,288 words (is that a lot?), all for my own pleasure. I’m still chugging away at Book of the Gods, but my rate of progress has severely slowed (writing this post means I’m not working on it). But it’s moving forward at least.

The weather before we left: foggy, cold and raining!

The holiday was great in general. It was nice weather most of the time, expect for one memorable storm that started suddenly with thunder and lightning in the middle of the day. Then hailstones the size of large marbles and ten minutes later, it’s over. An hour later, the sun has dried everything.

There was some family crisis, my poor wife hurt her back and shes still have some serious problems with it now, over two weeks later. It’s slowly getting better, but I won’t get into it. Besides that it was just good to get away.

The weather in France

I also got to do some drawing and painting, some of it came out quite nice, but I certainly didn’t produce as much output as I have done in previous years. One of the quirks of the place we go is that there is no television, no Internet connection and we don’t even bother to turn on the radio. It’s absolute great to disconnect. I did try to “tweet” a little while away but it seems I forgot that a text message is longer than 140 so I ended up with loads of messages that cut out right in the middle! Anyway, I left behind any of the work I did create so I all I have of the stuff I did are these photos:

I’m not too fond of the watercolour though. I never finished it, becoming frustrated by the mixing of the colours (I couldn’t produce enough consistent colours). I didn’t get the chance to do another though. The great thing though about where we go is that its full of inspiring things! Books and posters from the Napoleon era, this antique box of gaming stuff, these old boilers in every room or this great big tower at the front of the house:

But holidays can’t last forever I guess. And now I’m back in the real world. Go me!

Playing with the Lost Heroes RPG: “Book of Gods” Cover

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:21:56 +0000

I also had the title “An Adventures in Graphic design and Typography!” in my mind when I started putting together this post, but I think that might be a bit melodramatic. If you’re following me on twitter, you’d have seen this image before, but for those that don’t, what do you think? Does it look like an RPG you’d play?

Lost Heroes RPG: Front and Back Covers

Don’t mind the text on the back cover. It’s just a space filler for when I really write something.

I took a short break from working on Lost Heroes RPG and end up working on Lost Heroes RPG! Swinging from writing to graphics and layout. I just started playing around with ideas on paper for the front cover of Lost Heroes as a book and ended up taking it to the end.

I don’t think my efforts are professional, but they look good, good enough to fool you from a distance! I’m working with my “limits” here, using what I can do well, to produce something that looks good. The above image was generated using Inkscape, Gimp and original artwork by myself. The little icons I’ve been working on all along (just check out the “drawings” tag to see more about them).

I have to say, I’m loving Inkscape as a tool more and more. I can easily move around and edit elements of the above image. And the images are all ~~scalar vector graphics~~ scalable vector graphics so I can print them out at any resolution and they look good. I’m not sure how they’ll fit into a Desktop Publishing Tool when I finally start to think about layout of the PDFs later for Lost Heroes.

Here you can see the process in a little more detail. I used pencil, ink and charcoal while playing around with it. My original idea was the abstract “angel” with the floating symbols and a rope tided around his legs pulling him back down to a graphic-inspired city scape. I imagined the logo for Lost Heroes sort of exploding from the top of the image.

I’m not particularly happy with the Lost Heroes logo. It works but its static and a little boring. Doing a little search on “typography” found me getting quite inspired, realising that the text is as much part of the picture composition as anything else. Playing around with it, I wasn’t getting convincing or pleasing results though. I ended up just laying it out and modifying the other elements to work with it.

Flower Fairy Final

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:23:25 +0000

I finally put some time aside to finish off my “Flower Fairy” image. Here it is:

Flower Fairy (final)

If you remember, I started with this:

Flower Fairy (in ink)

I’ll leave it up to you guys to decide if the final image is better. The background is done in watercolours, the fairy’s colour was done, first by copying with my lightbox, then using grey markers and ink brush and then on the computer I used gimp to colour her. I only have a mouse, not a tablet to do work on the computer. Because of the limitations of using a mouse, I couldn’t finish the fairy character how I liked. I would have liked to strengthen her outline, like the original image, but with a mouse the effort would have looked very flaky.

Here is an inset of just the Flower Fairy, to show you how the colouring came out:

Flower Fairy (final) (inset)

It’s certainly not going to used as an illustration anywhere, but I’m proud of it. I also learned a lot and the more you learn, the better the rest of you’re drawing skill improves.

Flower Fairies and Revisiting “Satyrs and Goddesses”

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:56:26 +0000

Taking a break from coding or writing, I did do this little piece for my daughter Alice for her to colour in. It came out especially nice I think, so much so if I get the time I will do my own colouring. Alice’s take on the colours is not yet complete, but I might put it up here (or maybe on facebook) for a bit of fun.

Flower Fairy (in ink)

Also, a few weeks back, my wife bought me a new light box. A nice big one too. I love it, but I don’t have the desk space for it. I have to unpack it before I can use it and then put it away again before we can use the kitchen table for dinner! However, I did go back to the two projects that I had left over when my original light box broke.

I first tackled my “Britney” Satyr and used markers to add tone, planning to use the computer to chose colours.

"Britney" Satyr (colour attempt #1)

While I like the image, I was dissatisfied with it. So I ended up leaving it at this stage. I then dug out my water colours and tackled my Freyja concept (warning nudity):

Freyja (NSFW) (watercolor)

It came out alright, but I became frustrated with it, a sure sign that it’s no longer fun. So, for the time being, I’ve also disbanded this project. I think the image concept I have is good, so I’m sure I’ll revisit it again.

Now back to coding and writing!

Satyrs and Goddesses

Mark Cunningham — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:47:20 +0000

It seems so much easier to blog about my drawings than anything else, it’s certainly not for lack of topics to write about. Probably because I have something tangible to show and talk about. So I picked up my pencils and started doing some work on Sunday. I started drawing this female Satyr, based on a signature character from Lost Heroes RPG. This is my second attempt, but it’s not perfect. The character I imagined is older and more womanly, but I like it and planned to colour it using the technique I was practising in my last post. My wife described it as a “Britney Satyr”! However, as I was taking my pencil sketch and colouring it using markers, my light box gave out all I’ve got right now is the ink image, which loses a lot of the detail.

Female Satyr (in ink)

Once the lightbox broke, I then reverted it to pencil and started attacking a subject I’d like to take on. It’s the story of Freyja and the Brisingman necklace. Because I’m knee deep in Norse mythology at the moment writing for Lost Heroes, I’m thinking a lot about the Norse gods and Freyja, Goddess of love and to a much greater extent than the Greek Goddess of Love Aphrodite, she is also the Goddess of lust. I’m going to try it in watercolours, just because I have the itching to do so.

(The picture contains nudity… so follow the more link to see it)

Freyja and the Brisingman Necklace (in pencil)

Satyrs and Cityscapes: Exploring some new techniques

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:38:49 +0000

Satyr Colourtest #1

So I’ve been playing with some new techniques and some new equipment. The above image is the first colour image I’ve done in a while and it was coloured very quick. I used a “lightbox” to trace the original pencil sketch (which you can see below), then used a selection of toned coptic markers to give it shadow and depth. And finally, using gimp’s hand-drawn selection and “colorify” I was able to colour it in less than 30 minutes. I’m not sure I’m going to continue the image first, it was more for a test of techniques and equipment but I certainly like it. There are lots of little computer tricks I could have applied and I really didn’t go into depth in my choice of colours.

Satyr (original) in Pencil

Satyr done in Tone with Coptic Markers

I bought a really cheap lightbox, it says it’s A4 but it barely handles a full page. However a big proper one costs 50 euros or more, depending on brand, so I’d rather try a cheap one first to see if I’d use it before investing in a decent one. It’s just a bright light under a white perspex box and it allows me to place the original drawing on top and using the light I can trace it onto another page. I use to scan the image in and then print it out, which was laborious and time-consuming. This method I allows me to play with the original image while I copy it, improving and enhancing it. It also allows me more freedom when I sketch, I don’t have to worry about getting rid of the construction lines (which can be actually helpful for tracing).

Satyr done in Ink/Brush

Satyr done in Ink/Pen

I also bought a new set of watercolour paints and plan to try them next. I did have a set of watercolours, but I haven’t used them in years and they had all dried. When I was much younger, watercolours were my particular favourite type of paint though I never really mastered them. I also played with pens versus brushes. You can see the pen work versus brush on the same Satyr. My wife likes the brush one, but I feel I have a lot to master with the brush, but I think long term it’ll produce much better effects. I did try a bigger image:

Paris Cityscape in Ink/Brush

In the thumbnail version it looks okay, but I’m not particularly happy with the end result. I should have gone for deeper blacks and less tried to capture tone with shading. I think the original pencil version is better but doesn’t translate to computer well.

thedeadone.net » ink

My first RPG map

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