Don't Tell the Horses the Stable's on Fire.

Here are some thumbnails for a set of articles about Succubus themed villains, items and encounters from Nevermet Press (the gentlemen behind Open Game Table and the villain-a-week blog project). 

For the Mask of Truth; looking through the mask reveals the presence of shapeshifting demons out to tempt humans to do the stuff that they probably would have done without prompting. Got to adjust the eyehole effect.
A mancatcher and an amulet.
I'm filling in on the first week's villain portrait for The Desire. I'll readily admit that I ripped off Sargent completely, but it's bound to change before the final. And, hey, I gave her a different dress and jewelry and a peacock feather. And an indication of drapery in the background.  Plus, he's dead. So he can't sue. 

Been hitting a wall with drawing. Over and over. Making excuses for too long, not being ambitious enough. Only solution is more drawing. 

I got some how-to books on figure drawing and painting, but I honestly don't know how to learn from them. Do I copy what's in there? Just read it like a lesson plan? Who knows? I don't. 

(And this has nothing to do with Bear Vs. Shark, I just couldn't think of a good title so I put in the current iTunes track.)

Adventures in internet geekery

Four characters from the internet Planescape D&D game I play in (not run; I had to drop that one just because I've been trying to focus more on drawing and less time on the internet, which is an aspiration that isn't going so great right now...). There are like, seven to nine of us, though, so I haven't gotten everyone yet. There are a few characters that are unique enough (like a harpy and a cat-woman) that they would likely be good candidates for larger and more fleshed out things. Ideally, I wanted to do a height comparison but that kind of fell apart. I'm thinking that if I wanted to get really elaborate and do some sort of concept art thing, I could do a 360 degree drawing of a few characters and things like that. I really need to get more reference and get back to figure drawing.

I'm the guy with the spear on the left. He's a half-elf, named Isaac.

The thing I noticed recently is that when I play as a character (and it's usually over the internet, since I'm always the DM in real life) I tend to play as a certain type. If I'm not way over the top, my gut character, the archetype I'm associating with, is usually a confident leader-type (because I'm not confident and I don't like to talk) that tends to focus on fighting (maybe because I'm not athletic?). Armchair psychology is silly, though, so I'm going to say that it means absolutely nothing. Nothing to see here, move along.

There's always a trade-off as a young artist, fresh (okay, two years) out of school or wherever one's education came from. If you don't get a day job, you can put all of your focus on your work and develop your skills and ideas. But you'll also barely scrape by as far as money goes. With a day job, you don't worry so much about money (and in my case, I get an inside look at the publishing business) but your time and energy are limited by that. You have to be pretty disciplined to keep that constant balance and it's difficult to maintain it. Sometimes you're good and you're on it, with lots of momentum. Other times it's extremely frustrating, which is often where I find myself. I make stuff all day for someone else; when I go home, I usually don't feel like making more stuff. Sometimes I can make myself do it, other times I can't. I've never been great with patience, either, so it's very easy to get frustrated. There's no real way to "solve" the situation beyond figuring out a good middle path that leaves me producing work but also finding enough downtime so that I'm not pulling my hair out. It's always a balancing act, is what I'm saying.

Coming down the pike:
- Want to get back to doing comics.
- More work from Jonathan Jacobs and his partners in the RPG blog community under their new small-press publisher.
- COLOR
- PERSPECTIVE
- EXPLOSIVE FUCKING ACTION
- HUMMUS
- Start selling finished pieces on the internet.
- Develop my own setting for, you know, nerd stuff.

Unicorns have chosen sides in the Culture War.

Even the birthday cards I make for my friends are full of my wacky New England Liberalism. Hooray!

I only love you for your Faulknerian prose.

Two sketches for the last villain a week thing that I never wound up making because I got too busy with PaizoCon drawings and then preparing stuff at work for Book Expo of America. I feel bad.
This is a birthday card type thing for one of my roomates. I did it straight in pen, so it's a little wonky. Haven't done that in a while (or even worked in ink for a few months) and it was fun, because it forces you to deal with your mistakes rather than fuss over them. I need to work on my crosshatching and contrast if I keep working in ink at a later time.

I made a whole crapload of giant foamcore books for Workman's BEA booth this year. Normally we send out for them, but this time we got a huge printer and did it almost entirely in-house. So it was a hell of a two weeks. But everyone seemed happy with the booth and they like to make a big splash at the Expo. Probably won't be up there myself, but people seemed to like it. My boss and coworkers say I should get a raise (probably won't, but should) and that's always a nice feeling.

I found this under my bed and I thought I would put it up here.

Last piece for the PaizoCon fanzine thingy. A gallery of stolen oddities thought up by Adam Daigle. I suck at perspective, so this was a bigger challenge than it looks like it should have been.  But I'm fairly happy with it. 

Harpies ride cowgirl, just so you know. Put it in your Kama Sutra Monster Manual.

I joined a Cthulu Cult on my vacation this year.

This is a cloak for the PaizoCon fanzine this year. I didn't like drawing it that much, but it's the one everyone likes it seems.
Don't worry, it's only chocolate sauce.

I'm starting think I may rely too much on my reference. Maybe I need to stylize a little more or something.

Time to put a fork in the merciless socket of time.

It seems like all of the commissions I get wait until around May to pop up. Last year I had Blood of the Gorgon drawings to do from the sublet I had from my sister's friend, this year I have work on a villain per week for Quinn Murphy's blog At-Will and the PaizoCon fanzine for my internet D&D buddies on the Paizo.com messageboards. So I've been busy. Here are two sketches for Savis Rayn, tiefling warlock and well-intentioned villain.
... and here's the final pencil drawing. Goat or ram horns are common, so I wanted to go for Ibex horns. Huge difference. I swear. The foreshortening is a little weird, but by and large I'm pretty satisfied.
The second week is Grebs Follyfoot, halfling mage and nihilistic villain (must...resist...Big Lebowski quote...). The right one was my first idea, more puckish than homicidal while the left is more homicidal and crazy looking. On the right there's a deck of cards flying about, many of them on fire. Tiny, infinitesimal detail: both have the image of a broken tower worked into them, either in a pendant or The Tower tarot card.
And here's the final for Follyfoot. I'll mention that both of these villains are my friend Phil. Yeah, I keep saying I'll use more models but, well, he does a good job on expressions. I'm trying to challenge myself more rather than playing it safe (I'm doing these for free, so I want to make sure they're entertaining to work on as well as good quality) so I've tried to do a high perspective on a character with different proportions from a normal human. It looks okay to me, but I'm open to criticism. I also wanted to do some bad-ass tattoos, until I realized how little time I had to work, so I just went with scales and stuff.
Two sketches for the Paizocon fanzine. Look close at the left one and you'll see that it's me for once. I'm most worried about the cloak on the right: I have to figure out how to give it form while not making the figure the star of the show.
My friend Adam wrote up a gallery/art thief ring with a lot of fun treasures and this is the sketch I came up with for that. It'll probably be a fun challenge, since I'm usually scared of perspective and things like that, but I think it looks good and there are a lot of interesting objects to work on.

It's going to be a really busy week. Friday is the absolute deadline for all of this stuff, including the last villain for Quinn ("The Summoner"). I'm hoping to get the raving guy in the desert and the cloak finished by tomorrow night along with a sketch for the last villain. But it's going to be tough. Plus, this is the start of book show season for Workman publishing which means a lot for me to do in the next two weeks or so. Oy.

My birthday was on Tuesday and I chose that horrible night (really, what idiot goes out on a Tuesday? This guy!) to have a great time. Dinner with some good friends at Soy and Sake (highly recommend it) and then a drink with my friend Hilary at Draft Barn. Good times, now I'm ancient. I'm pretty happy, all things considered: even if I'm always tired, I draw every night now. I feel like a crummy friend sometimes because I don't get out as often as I should to see people, but that will be remedied and then I won't feel bad about it.

Stay tuned for four more drawings by Friday!