« Previous Entries

My Cthulhu/thedeadone Fudge Dice!

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)

thedeadone gaming dice?

I came across dicecreator via twitter. He makes these exceptional custom dice for gaming such as these amazing Fudge dice (image on the right). And during some testing of his equipment he decided to use my twitter icon as a test for some dice:

Which, to use the American vernacular, is awesome!

Anyway, he recently ran a competition and guess who won? Me!

So now I get to design my own dice, one black and one red both six-sided. My first thought was to use some of the “icons” I created for Lost Heroes, but these might be too complicated to fit nicely on a dice. Also, they wouldn’t be very practical in a game.

So my thinking turned to Fudge dice, perhaps with one of the “+” symbols is replaced, one would be the Lost Heroes main icon and on the other dice, a slightly modified version of my twitter icon. The actual + and – symbols I’d customise too, thinking for one a stark pointy sword shapes and for the other tentacle like. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get down to do some drawing and see what comes out.

I’ll post the results here anyway. Also means I need to game in the next while!

Some new art work: Meave and Dead Eyes

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?)
Read More…

I’m back two weeks already? My my my…

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)

Magic Character add-on idea

While working on the Fudge One Month Adventure Challenge (I’m not going to finish it in time, but that’s not really the point), I had an idea for a RPG magic system. I was thinking about how to put the entire system on a single page for the adventure I’m writing, including a magic system and I wanted to keep it simple to understand. A brief discussion on the mailing list and it got me thinking about what magic should be in a roleplaying game.

I know, this is a big can of worms and everyone but everyone has an opinion about what should a magic system be or how it should feel etc. But this is about what I think magic should be like in a game, not anyone elses and my feeling is that magic should be strange, weird and mysterious. Of course this is completely at odd with the mechanical/systematic nature of roleplaying systems and settings. You need magic to be some what systematic otherwise it is nothing more than random rolls on a table. I also think magic users should be different to everyone else, they should see and react to the world different. They live in a world-view that’s is alien to the average joe, that’s what makes them magic users. Be that world-view spirits and demons or UFOs and aliens.

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

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.

: Inital Concept (pencil)

: Fleshing it out (pencil)

: Fleshing it out #2 (pencil and ink)

: Final Ink of Figure

: Working with the Figure on Computer

: Lost Heroes RPG: Front and Back Covers

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 Fairies and Revisiting “Satyrs and Goddesses”

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):

Satyrs and Goddesses

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) Read More…

Satyrs and Cityscapes: Exploring some new techniques

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.

A Frustrating Day

So I’m finally getting over being poorly last week, but I’m finding I’m not up to full speed yet. I’m quite tired from the run of antibiotics. Last night, after the kids were in bed, I planned to do some writing (on Lost Heroes) and some painting (bought some new watercolours) but instead, all I could do was zombie out in front of the TV for half an hour before I crawled up to bed.

Today has turned out to be a frustrating one. Work was going fine till after lunch, when my PC started to act weird. It’s a new PC that I’ve just got up to spec with all the software I need and have been using fine for two weeks. So I reboot and it won’t start – can’t find “boot device”. As it turns out my hard drive is fecked. So the whole afternoon is lost, I couldn’t even go and do something else. I’ve lost some stuff, nothing critical, but I have lost some work on TDO Mini Forms which I hadn’t been backing up.

Anyway, chin up. I’ll get a new harddrive tomorrow, spend the rest of the day re-installing all the software I need and trying to recover as much data as I can and just getting on with it.

« Previous Entries

Posts tagged with keywords "LH"