captain brushpen

Filomeno: sketch for another iOS game

2012-02-19T19:34:00.001-08:00

And the original rough sketches:

fluffball was being really cute today

2012-02-01T14:45:00.000-08:00

Watercolor doodle of my cockatiel hen, who can be incredibly sweet occasionally.

watercolor doodle!

2012-01-28T02:26:00.001-08:00

ShantyTown painting notes: behind-the-scenes for other artdorks

2012-01-27T00:54:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a pretty shanty job adding thoughtful commentary on process in this blog, probably because by the time I'm posting images it's usually pretty late/early and I just want to go to sleep. This time around, I created a folder and dumped images into them as I went, so a few days out from making a painting I can still give a coherent presentation on the choices that happened.

<--- First, there was this card. A card so aesthetically out of character for certain game that all of the players in said game started cat-calling or generally making up, well, shanty town shanties whenever it went into play. What was everyone's objection? Mostly that the card art was so obviously in the wrong style (the term "Simpsons" came up a lot) as well as utterly failing to convey what a shanty town was. What is happening on this card? Some kind of weird drug deal out of grounded tree-houses between mask-wearing RenFaire guys by the light of the full moon? It was actively distracting from gameplay, and it's the reason I'm doing this series of hypothetical Dominion card repaints.

So shanty towns. They're not usually very chipper places; crushing poverty, houses sculpted out of refuse, no sanitation. But it's hard not to think of mostly modern incarnations (everything built out of that ubiquitous corrigated steel siding, nylon tarps, and old tires); and the art direction for Dominion (and specifically, the card set this is form, Intrigue) dictates that the setting be some form of 1000A.D. - 1700 A.D., essentially some time in which tyrannical, hereditary monarchies were still a popular form of governance. My first idea that sprang up from a 10 minute sketch was something like this: moody and crumbling, and somehow made of non-anachronistic materials.... (Lots of wood? Rope, and maybe disgusting pieces of old cloth/hides?)

I started trying to refine this sketch into a painting, but...with no idea of what the actual houses were built out of, I sat there tapping my stylus a bit and going, "Huh." (All those European History BAs out there? Salute to you guys. All my background knowledge is in the cognitive theory of attention, and also monkeys.) So I shantied off across the internet for an hour, trying to answer the question, "What does a slum town that springs up around the edge of a vaguely European nation/state capital in the 1200's look like?"

As you can tell, I got distracted and drew giant bugs and desert warriors in the corner. But hey. I did some research. Haystacks and old rushes and broken wagon wheels: sort of like the litter of the 1300's? And while I was at it, I was really trying to solve the communication problem that the original card didn't meet: the art on the card should be about getting an abundance of desperate people to do your bidding, and it's also about a town or region. (Human interest is important, but the shanty town itself has to show up at 2"x3" from five feet back.)

So at the bottom left corner there is the compostion that I think I can make cover all of the demands: shanty town is understandably a slum and a town, some human interest going on, middle ages, poor, and also kind of dark. This is that image, blown up and with some middle gray dropped over it.

And then over the course of 3 hours: a whole lot of value control, subtle composition edits for size, making sure clothing and architecture make reasonable sense, and a whole lot of rendering....(Put on some montage music, if you've got it.)

(I'm not so happy about the color, but I told myself I'd do this in less than 5 hours, so the color was left pretty vague, somewhere around "icky 8pm smoggly night fog", as frequently seen around San Francisco.)

<--So here's how my final card repaint came out. (Just to be clear, I'm doing these as a design exercise and just for fun; I'm hoping Rio Grande Games doesn't mind. I do actually own all of the real paper cards, and play the heck out of them.) The scan of the original card came from http://dominion.diehrstraits.com/?card=shanty+town, and if you're like me and all this reading about it makes you need a Dominion fix, you should head over to http://dominion.isotropic.org/.

Final note; everything in this post was done digitally in Photoshop CS4 or 5. Woo. (Except the paper textures; scanned those from my favorite sketchbooks, Canon cold press something or other.)

waiting for the 10:40pm Caltrain

2012-01-24T14:00:00.001-08:00

Tiny super-fast sketches, 4rth&KingSt station.

DominionRedux: Duchess sketch

2012-01-23T15:10:00.000-08:00

I am excited for this babe, because despite a quick googleimage trawl for "duchess"+"oil painting" revealing primarily bored women, and bored women with ugly babies, I think a card that gives you +2 coin AND lets you clean up the junk off the top of your deck...come one, give the lady some credit. Plus. Since she comes with any given Duchy, you know that she's got huge...tracts of land. Amirite?

Bonus link: At the moment, she is lookin' a little too sassy about holding the purse-strings, maybe? http://goo.gl/g5Qf7

[Update: So much fun, this picture]

A quick 20 warm up paint

2012-01-19T23:33:00.001-08:00

DominionRedux: ShantyTown

2012-01-17T21:30:00.001-08:00

DominionRedux: I love Dominion and I love painting. So just for fun, I'm painting my versions of some of the original cards.... [ Original art of Shanty Town at diehrstraits.com]

DominionRedux: Envoy

2012-01-14T21:30:00.001-08:00

DominionRedux: I love Dominion and I love painting. So just for fun, I'm painting my versions of some of the original cards.... [ Original art of Envoy at diehrstraits.com]

What Other People Wore Today: Teddybear vests and hair capes

2012-01-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

(Drawing my own fashion statements would be very boring: I own black jeans and two black hoodies, both exactly the same.)

Why did all my siblings grow up into evil villains?

2012-01-13T21:11:00.000-08:00

Sketched entirely in Photoshop, hommies. I finally scanned all the paper types that I used to draw on in highschool, and it feels like coming home, even if I'm just hanging out on an overlay layer.

Susabell

2011-12-13T17:05:00.001-08:00

20 minute paints each

2011-12-07T14:06:00.001-08:00

Sketchin' some jackets.

2011-12-04T18:40:00.001-08:00

.....Yeaaaah, the animal thing was a good kick in the paints, but became a drag by day 9. Been slamming my uneducated head into how to draw people better over the past few weeks, since I've been cheating my way along on really skant knowledge for far too long. Cannot recommend Messeurs Loomis or Vilppu enough, if anyone else ends up in this cul-de-sac.

I can't seem to get designs for the Shift (a comic I'm working on with my friend Max Gladstone) settled at all, and a lot of that seems to be due to a big gaping hole in my skill set that I'm trying to repair right now.

With a little help from my friends... (Day 9)

2011-11-16T18:34:00.001-08:00

A Fail Whale permutation. http://goo.gl/sf8gC :)

Raptorington returns (Day 8)

2011-11-16T00:40:00.001-08:00

Raptorington returns, the scrawny scaley sissy that he is. ('bout 45 minutes of messing around in Photoshop.)

He's from a short film I made back in 2008. Dan says he's gained weight since I last drew him. :)

(The animation is here: http://youtu.be/ILEihs3cbmg )

We wuz jest havin' a friendly word w' 'im (Day 7)

2011-11-14T18:26:00.001-08:00

more DF art and other doodles

2011-11-13T19:57:00.001-08:00

I find it very charming that for Harry Dresden, "Evil Subconcious Version of Self" translates into, "Probably just a version of me that knows how to use hair product and owns cooler black clothing".

This was just painted from vague memory, but I wanted to read the scene again when I was posting this...and look what I found on google books! As part of my mission to destroy someone else's productive day, here's a link to tasty, tasty story.

This silly picture is still popping up in the background from time to time, when I'm hanging out with friends and fooling with paint and half my brain. :) It makes me miss falling asleep by the fire in my old apartment so much...

Finally, a doodle for use as profile ID on random sites.

Day 6

2011-11-12T23:46:00.001-08:00

Um....also a doodle done in under 15 minutes of fooling. Er. Gonna get better at this.....

Day 5

2011-11-12T00:01:00.001-08:00

Hmmmm. Note to me: start daily painting sooner than 10 minutes before midnight, and start with...better idea.

Sloth (Day 4)

2011-11-10T23:33:00.001-08:00

Angry 'Tiel (Day 3)

2011-11-10T00:10:00.000-08:00

Arg. crazy day, got this done the last three minutes of 11/9/2011.
(My cockatiel's sometimes exactly like this: a ball of evil fat that destroys towers of my stuff.)

Hunting Birds (Day 2)

2011-11-08T21:33:00.000-08:00

My brother haz kittens.

I do not.

LIFE ENVY.

Day 1

2011-11-07T16:41:00.000-08:00

Day one of a fifty-image sprint!

Going to go for a daily animal paint for the next 50 days, to keep the stylus moving. And because I have a ridiculous crush on these little fellas, I'mma call them Day 0.

scribble speedpaint

2011-10-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

Slapped some flat paint on a sketch. M'not very happy with it, but I got nothin' else for today (that I can show).

Hazards of pigeon-based lift...

2011-10-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

Just what you needed, right? More DresdenFiles.

2011-10-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

More DresdenFiles. I know, I know...

2011-10-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

Fanart is super-dorky, but it's making me draw up a storm during the hour or so I need to warm up every day. Maybe cooler people do not need this warm up time...I just know that everything I draw for the first 45 minutes is likely to look pretty wonky. Anyway! This was the first sketch, scribblin' in brushpen on the caltrain and trying to figure out his jaw...

Armed with the vague knowledge of at least what a 32-year old Jewish medical examiner who get thumped around by zombies should look like, I stuck my head into my cintiq for about 30 minutes and came up with this:

....and in the end, having not actually color-calibrated anything for like 4 months, I have no idea what color his skin is on other people's monitors. (OPM? Should that be a frequently-used abbreviation?)

Mad Max lifedrawing and sketches

2011-10-24T15:33:00.000-07:00

We lucked out and had Vivian modeling this Sunday-- I couldn't do that leather justice in a quick sketch, but she put together a fantastic set of costumes.

Also a quick set of preliminary character sketches for what I think would be an awesome comic (hey Jared, if you're reading this, you should be writing instead. ;)

Told you so.

2011-10-23T20:26:00.000-07:00

Part of it was ALREADY on fire

2011-10-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

Shameless, shameless fan art for the Dresden Files.

Roommates round 2

2011-10-18T23:37:00.000-07:00

Second round of scribbles, after the first 15 minutes of gettin' the idea down. This is probably more like an hour of noodling, trying to get the characters accurate.

mouse

2011-10-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

Roommates (sketch)

2011-10-17T17:47:00.000-07:00

In flight riggin'

2011-10-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

Action! Adventure! Extremely inadvisable ways to spend your Wednesdays!

(This is a quick sketch that I might paint more, if I have a chance. Same ship as many posts below.)

Frriieeeeeend?!!?

2011-10-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

He just wants a hug.

Gerbil König

2011-10-06T17:57:00.000-07:00

Just a silly shirt design for my husband, since I haven't scanned anything in a few days. Based on, er, our addiction to the subway chain "Bretzel König" when we visited Switzerland.

Bees!!

2011-10-03T12:55:00.000-07:00

(Now Day 0 of the 50 day animal paintin' sprint. :)

some fast en plein air sketches

2011-09-30T23:32:00.000-07:00

More painting practice! Sketches on the x220 laptop, sitting in the shade around the Stanford Medschool

[45 minutes, trying to catch a lot of the bounce light]

[20 minutes, going for the colors, but my laptop's battery died before I could start cleaning things up]

Also, I love the first two images in this wiki article on the topic.

A girl and her body

2011-09-29T19:29:00.000-07:00

More of dirty (undead) preteens. I blame the guy running MidWinter.

Full confession; this image kicked my butt for at least two hours. Getting a glowing ghost effect that I actually like is going to take some more experimentation, I guess. Well, specifically, getting a glowing-but-rendered-ghost image that casts its own light *while* being translucent and back-lit: perhaps that was just simply not a good idea. Dang.The original sketch, done in-game over about thirty minutes:

And the two hours of photoshop-wrangling later, completely repainting the ghost:

I did not intend for this to "dirty street urchin" week, but my sketchbook says otherwise.

2011-09-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

Anyone else having that horrible CS5/wacom blotting problem, where every 1/5 strokes loses pressure sensitivity? (You can kind of fix it by upping the tablet's reported sample rate.)

[30 minutes speedsketch in PS5.]

A gentleman among all the lady drawings

2011-09-27T12:08:00.000-07:00

10 minutes of sketching, and then my attention wandered.

MidWinter doodles

2011-09-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

Some sketches of my character from a friend's RPG. Kid's a Korean american 13-year-old who just learned how to talk inanimate objects to life-- and while his recent past has not involved as much sugar as he's accustomed to, he usually doesn't look *this* depressed. Guess my blah mood is bleeding over.

Moar paint practice :B

2011-09-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

quick colors on lifedrawing sketches

2011-09-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

Awh man, the Gallery Girls hold fantastic poses, and the crazy old Russian Embassy where these events go down is such a beautiful place to draw. I tried going in costume this time, and I gotta say, it is about 300% harder to draw things in a corset and high boots. Next time I'm just going to shuffle in wearing a hoodie and sneakers.

This one (heck, like most of my life drawings) is not safe for prudeville. Those silly striped ruffle shorts sure are making the rounds in the SF steamnerd scene.

Guys, make a decision already

2011-09-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

Chipper gent, now in color

2011-09-09T16:16:00.000-07:00

Some cities, some MidWinter

2011-09-07T13:38:00.000-07:00

Bad Hooooorse

2011-09-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

This was originally a MidWinter RPG doodle, but I think the horse has stolen it. Whenever I see this picture, the Bad Horse Chorus comes charging into my brain.

Character design sketches

2011-09-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

Better brushes for Photoshop

2011-09-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

This image was made entirely digitally with "Nagel Pencil 1", which is my new best drawing friend.

I've been struggling to put together a Photoshop version of a decent pencil since forever, and I've spent a really sad couple of days slowly chewing together images with a brush I set up using Dual brushes (which is horrible to control: it feels like drawing with live worms that settle into place a couple of seconds after you finish drawing.) Enter the Nagel brush set: it's awesome.

Also, I'm now running all of my painting off of the Lenovo x220 tablet, and it's a tough little beast. <3 I'm not even running it at full power (not that the fan is all that loud) and it's juggling giant photoshop files like nothin'. We'll see how Maya 2011 goes tomorrow. :\

Invariably

2011-08-26T13:47:00.001-07:00

Style test!

2011-08-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

Custom photoshop brushes FOR THE WIN

more airships, more mechanics

2011-08-08T15:32:00.000-07:00

And this is brainstorming (the winning thumbnail) to full sketch, to this-is-how-it-works notation explosion:

Always dapper, even when dead

2011-08-06T06:02:00.000-07:00

Ornithopter art and development sketches

2011-08-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

Too busy to post daily, going to go back to the every-few-days-sketchdump.

More work on ornithopters....

2011-08-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

Toshbeasts: kitten + darkling beetle

2011-08-03T17:10:00.000-07:00

MangaStudio: also a friend?

2011-07-28T05:29:00.000-07:00

Best digital inking experience outside of Painter (and Painter is horrible at basic editing and layers.) I likes, I likes.

Game concept arts

2011-07-27T16:46:00.000-07:00

And my exceedingly clever thought process about ship design:

Tag along

2011-07-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

I filled 2/3 of a 60page sketchbook while in Europe, but I gotta say my favorite drawing out of the notebook was the ducks. Austria has some very cute ducks.

para sol

2011-07-07T16:02:00.000-07:00

Hand-feeding the SF steamdork: like baking cake

2011-07-06T14:25:00.000-07:00

Just add gears and googles, friend. GOOGLES ON ALL THINGS. Why did I not put googles on the zepplin. >:[ Room for improvement, yes.

always loved this gent

2011-07-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

A doodle on a loose sheet of paper that's been chasing its way through my piles of sketchbooks and whatnot for ages. I love the chipper ones.

Pandas. + Ornithopters?

2011-06-29T16:25:00.000-07:00

More pandas

2011-06-24T13:07:00.000-07:00

Panda doodles

2011-06-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

If anyone's reading this blog and bugged by the "You Might Also Like..." LinkWithin feature, lemme know and I'll think about it. I just thought it was kinda fun, since posts really do get buried. I really liked the way it works on Charles Santoso's blog. (His pencil work is *amazing*.)

So much Gold, so few Buys

2011-06-23T00:15:00.000-07:00

Dominion touches all our lives, yes?

MidWinter, and cephalopod card games....

2011-06-22T15:14:00.000-07:00

Hooka Bob

2011-06-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

Is that so

2011-06-20T13:11:00.001-07:00

Bikes again

2011-06-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

More clowning

2011-06-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

Increasing the overall puppy content of das Interwebs

2011-06-17T23:18:00.000-07:00

Enough bikes, time for monsters

2011-06-16T13:33:00.000-07:00

More of these fellas, from this earlier post. I'm working on creature design for a webcomic-to-be, we hope. ;)

This was what their origins look like....

Tire fix

2011-06-16T10:49:00.001-07:00

More bicyclist sketches!

2011-06-15T22:34:00.000-07:00

20 minutes, 10 minutes, and a really quick 2 minute one, I think. Note to other pen dorks out there: Staedtler MARS graphic brushpens are MADE OF MAGIC. They feel like drawing with, uh, the default Photoshop hard brush. Which I like. A lot. I hunt them down whenever I'm in art stores.

An old ink brush sketch, revisited

2011-06-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

Some old ink art from a comic project that some friends from college were working on. I miss inking. :)

Another 5 minute pencil sketch gets walluped with color

2011-06-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

And the pencils:

Drawin' on the Caltrain, buggin' the other passengers.

2011-06-13T06:08:00.000-07:00

This girl was sitting across the isle from me, and clearly started to be slightly confused about my creepy staring. I had a friend who drew amazing scenes from life point out this awesome trick to me: wrap-around reflective sports sunglasses. Look like a badass, and stop spooking the targets of your sketches. Gotta try that.

Anyway, I've always really enjoyed the frame that the caltrain windows make around passengers, and the really nice golden-hour lighting that you sometimes get.

I think that the final sketch was not a winner, but I'm linking it for honesty's sake. Still trying to figure out how to balance (literally) short-cut keys and keyboard use with tablet drawing. It's really hard to get anything done in Photoshop without keyboard input, at least for me-- the x220 doesn't have a great screen ratio for storing menus and tools while you're trying to paint. I have an absolutely goofy roll-up rubber keyboard that I'm experimenting with-- also, I've tried holding the computer in my lap, like an open book, with the tablet on one side and the keyboard still accessible on the other.

For the fellow commuters's recent events interest: this was being drawn in the front car, right as caltrain NB143 ran over someone at Burlinggame on Wed 6/8...that's after the medical emergency on Tuesday 6/7, and the day before the other suicide on 6/9. It's been icky times.
The girl stopped smiling right as I finished this, and the whole car turned into drunk (and high) riot about missing the SF Giants game, the price of suicide, and general angst, so I gave up and put the computer away.

this post devoted to David Malki !, Ryan North, and Kate Beaton

2011-06-12T18:58:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty pumped that these three people exist. In the space between Wondermark and Dinosaur Comics, everything is awesome. (The licence plate on our car is "MRTUSKS" simply for the joy.) And I have recently discovered Hark! A Vagrant, but not yet reached creepy levels of stalking her.

This very excellent beard brushpen doodle brought to you by David Malki at Maker Faire.

Turkey vulture flyover

2011-06-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

Full size on my favorite one (link).

They have BLUE EYES

MidWinter: this doodle also experienced a photoshop attack

2011-06-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

I was originally just adjusting the levels, and then I got all into the lighting. Tons of things I would do different in the future; this was just playing around with some glowing (I did it for the red eyes, man!)

I still think that in both images (the Weatherman, the deer) the pencils were stronger. Alas.

Here's a minute of ballpoint pen doodles to make up for all that photoshoping.

(Rebecca: that's what Brian would look like if he was caucasian.)

Godbeasts hit their third revision

2011-06-10T06:27:00.000-07:00

Paul-Joys-at-Battle, and more of the cockatiel

2011-06-09T10:10:00.000-07:00

This gentleman is the younger version of a character in a comic that Max Gladstone and I might FINALLY (my fault) get working on again, esp. if I sell my commute time to it. Caltrain 40-80 minutes each way is a lot of time in a day, and I'm thinking ballpoint pens and I might get together and conspire about doing full page layouts during that time.

.....aaaaand some ink tests on a new brushpen. Just to keep the blog title represetin'.

Wednesday's post, back-dated

2011-06-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

Missed a day of posting, but at least I was drawing! Have so much work right now, it's hard to figure out time in the mornings for these...here's the pencils of the MidWinter Weatherman drawing, also brought to you by the Caltrain.

Dylan, take 4

2011-06-07T11:32:00.000-07:00

(Yes, she is manly. It is part of her charm and continued survival.)

morning bird

2011-06-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

First collaboration between my x220 tablet and my cintiq! Getting up early makes me miss my bird's peaced out half-awake time. :(

Theater posters

2011-05-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

...And the final draft, which I like a bit less:

apidae are adorable

2011-05-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

bird, bird, dog

2011-05-07T00:17:00.001-07:00

I'm feelin' the love for my new camera (Canon EOS 60D, 18-135mm kit lens). It's full of awesome. More on that later; these were just two quick snapshots today while working. For reference, this is how big the birds actually were to the eye, since they were probably 80' in the air above the roof:

Also, a drawing of Jack's dog Miss Piggy. I have never seen a dog sleep so adorably through 2 hours of strangers talking before. I amped up the saturation so that you, too can appreciate the rainbow that the iPhone4 camera's greenspot adds under florescent lighting. Makes grabbing clips of b/w text on paper frustrating, but sometimes it's fun. (Someday, this will be a retro camera effect: "Apply iPhone4? Y/N" It will create the greenspot, add a little bit of jelly-morph to capture the cmos wobble-read, and crank up the ISO grain, and bam, it's like 2010 all over again!)

I'm switching over to picasa-uploads, as the inline blogger-upload tool creates nasty image compression artifacts. That's lame. I'm paying $5 whole bucks for storage, man! I want fat, rich, uncompressed pixels!

If you open these in two links tabs to jump back and forth, you can see what a tool like me is rambling about.

1) Example of the last posts' images on the blogger server (compressed, eeew)

2) Example of the picasa server, where I can dictate final image quality

It's most noticeable on things like the gray background and skin tones. Boo. I bet it also does icky things to reds, like I'm rambled about in the past (here). Only those of you who are on great monitors and also color/sharpness nuts will be bugged by the graininess...anyone else reading this probably thinks I'm nuts. That's cool.

Three Parts Dead: lots of hidden art crawls out of my hard drives

2011-05-02T01:00:00.000-07:00

All of the art for Three Parts Dead can be found with this tag:

[ three parts dead ]

There's even a really dorky animation of Abe somewhere at the end of things.

All of these were created as part of conversations over skype with Max; none are really all that finished (in fact, some were very educational for how much planning and layering in an image is Too Much; the above image of Tara and Ms. K flying to Alt Coulumb would break your netbook if you tried to open it.) Overall, I wish I'd just spent more time doing lots of loose sketches instead of making running leaps at monstrous paintings where I never got a chance to get beyond basic linework, like these two guys:

Max Gladstone is responsible for all of these characters; Rebecca deserves all kinds of credit giving me a discerning lecture on how to better draw the laaaaydies.

More too come when my schedule unlocks in a few weeks! Horrah!

A brief bout of Lenovo X201 Tablet bonding

2011-04-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

...if I could have 2 new computers, this would be one of them. Mmmmmm. Why did Modbook have to croak bellyup? It was made of MAGIC. Expensive magic, but still. This was at the Stanford Bookstore, courtesy of the very nice employees there who gave me a stylus to play with in order to keep me in a corner out of their way.

Sneaking in some felting

2011-04-25T21:11:00.001-07:00

That Splash class Sithel and I taught got me hooked.

More MidWinter art!

2011-04-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

Children yelling at each other about responsible decision-making while holding steak knives in the snow surrounded by corpse-wolf zombies and other monsters. 'Bout sums up most of our game sessions.

And this is a tower of slush being attacked by a zombie mammoth and goblins while gravity inverts itself. (I know, it's not much of a sketch after that description, but I was having fun making rays of light with my tiny eraser during the game.)

Humbolts look like they have rottweiler eyes

2011-04-18T06:52:00.000-07:00

More of the Saltonstall menagerie.

2011-04-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

10 second charcoal sketches.

Caption this:

2011-04-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

One of Max and Lynn's cats plots dastardly deeds.

Some sketches of the laaaydies. And some pants.

2011-04-15T01:38:00.000-07:00

Quick (5? 8?) minute sketches from Dr. Sketchy's back in Feb. I think that it is quite difficult to rock stripped lacy clown pantaloons, and Talia (the model) rocked them very hard. She was an aerial silks performer, so she was actually *more* jacked than I ended up drawing her here. (Respect to that: I still cannot do a pull-up.)

Playing card art; but from a totally different project

2011-04-12T01:39:00.000-07:00

Last year I was a Conference Associate at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco (it's a huge volunteer group that staffs GDC all week). The CAs are a rambunctious group of very friendly people, and aside from running around the conference combating entropy, we also hung out late in a huge group and played a whole lot of a Mafia/Werewolf variant called "Witch". The cards were blank on the playing side with a label jotted in the bottom, and CAs were encouraged to walk by and grab a few to illustrate during slow shifts. Here's a couple of the ones I drew while working a very boring product session. The photos are blurry, smudgy things from my old (bless its little heart) broken 1.3 MP LG Touch camera phone. Macro (and text) were not its specialties, alas.