Getting Some Attention (craft project)

Okay, so I realized recently that my role at work is very much like one of those quest-giver NPCs in World of Warcraft.  People come to me for a "quest" or to get some lore.  When they're done with their "quest" they turn it in and get another one.  So I joked that I really should have one of those big yellow exclamation marks over my head.

<lightbulb>

Well, why not?

So I went to the craft store, bought some styrofoam and dowels, and made a big yellow exclamation mark which now sits over my desk.  It's fun and provides an easy way for people to find me.

Make hole in hemisphere base, hot-glue wooden dowel

Cut tip off cone to make upper part of exclamation point

More hot glue to secure dowel better

Use cardboard tube to hold base with dowel in place for gluing and drying

Start tunnel in base of exclamation point upper with penknife

Continue tunneling with long screwdiver

Glue dowel into base of exclamation point upper

Use white glue to fill in gaps (bottom of exclamation mark)

Paint exclamation point yellow...

 

..and keep adding coats of yellow until styrofoam doesn't show through any more

Paint stem black and base purple (eventually four coats)

How to Make a Death Trap: The Crafting

Okay, so when I game I usually use a big flexible battlemat which I've had for years.  It's got a square grid on one side and a hex grid on the other and you draw on it with markers.  But in my current campaign my players are diving into a series of dangerous challenges set by the mysteriously-disappeared demon ruler of a demi-plane.  They're doing a big outdoor challenge battle right now but when (if) they get past than then they go down into more of a dungeon setting with a series of danger rooms.  So I decided that for these rooms I'd do a minor bit of drawing and crafting to make them more memorable.  Below is discussion and photos of making the boards.  When (if) they survive the rooms I'll do a follow-up post with full pics and the rules mechanics for each room.

1. I started with two 20" by 30" foam core poster boards from the craft store, the type with a rough paper surface you can draw on rather than the shiny finish.

2. Since I wanted a grid, I started by drawing registration marks around the edge ever inch.  After I finished the first board using a ruler, I marked the other boards by matching them up next to it and duplicating the marks.

3. Then I used the edge of one board as a straight edge to quickly draw some light pencil lines from mark to mark in one direction...

...and then mark to mark in the other direction to make the grid...

...which went pretty quickly.

(Also, I did grids on both sides of both boards to make them double-sided to save money.)

 4. Then I used a regular felt tip pen to draw the walls and some triangular marks to show the center of each edge in an interesting way.

5. I colored in the triangles using Sharpie brush-tip permanent markers...

...and the entrance alcoves with pencil shading.

6. Finally, and this took pretty long, I used hatching and dots (based on the map style of Dyson Logos) to add some thickness to the walls.  Then some Chinese characters with the brush Sharpies to indicate the dominant element of the room.

Finished my huge painting!

Yup, I just finished it today.  There are a couple small touch-ups and then it goes up on the wall.

Painting progress

Okay, so I had a couple chunks of time this weekend to work on my large painting inspired by classical Chinese art.  The bamboo is done and I'm pretty happy with the shading.  The characters all came out nicely but I'm worried they're a bit small to fill that space.  Originally I planned to fill in the whitespace around them with black background to provide a nice sharp contrast.  Now I'm re-thinking it and may 1) just keep the white squares but tidy them up a bit, or 2) tidy up the edges and also paint over the three black spacers between the characters to create one big white rectangle, or 3) add an outer border of purple, which will include making the three spacers purple as well.

Criminey, more art.

Okay, so after months of sketching, looking for inspiration, and some desultory roughing out in pencil I finally put some paint on the dang canvas.  Yes, it's just slapping on some background but it's the principal of the thing.  The long white bits on the left will eventually be bamboo--haven't decided about any leafy bits yet--and the blank bit on the right will have my favorite Chinese chengyu phrase in gold.  The orange origami paper is just there to help with visualization, but I kind of like they way it looks anyway.

Order of the Stick Characters for Gaming

Okay, so I really like the webcomic Order of the Stick (OotS).  It features the antics and adventures of a group of D&D type character and it's full of excellent gaming in-jokes.  The artistic style, as its name suggests, is based on very simple figures.  A little while back I was thrilled to come across Derek Weller's blog, iheartprintandplay, where he presents lots of printable paper miniatures for gaming drawn in the OotS style.

I'm considering taking the plunge and trying my hand at drawing some--primarily with the goal of doing character portraits of the PCs in the games I'm involved in.  So I was wondering if anyone else does OotS characters anywhere.  I figure that I should try to see how other artists have expressed different creatures, races, clothing, hair styles, etc.  My first stop, as always when looking for art, was Deviant Art.  And I was pleasantly surprised to find several artists with OotS characters, often in very large numbers.  Keep in mind that these are not formatted paper miniatures, but terrific bits of art (sometimes as avatars for web use).  Here are some of my favorite OotS style artists from Deviant Art:

versipelles

kd7sov

thormag

Crimms/Devil_drawer1988

flutterella

PsiMonkey

MCSquared42

darkfaun

Hooray! My Heraldric Molding Project is Done!

Okay, so I've been working on this project to paint up many, many feet of crown molding with cool medieval heraldric shields.  There were hundreds and hundreds of shields, each requiring a painted base pattern and then ornamentation using paint, sharpie markers, and decals.  This afternoon I sprayed on the final sealing finish.  The painting is now finally (OMG finally) complete.  Now I just have to rent a nailgun somewhere and put it up without damaging it.  I am a bit worried that it might not reach all the way around the room now.  I had to remove some ends due to rough cuts or cuts which went through a shield.  I also had to get rid of a couple ends which suffered water damage from some flooding in the basement.  But I'm already thinking of adding in some sort of focal point feature, like a larger single shield, which would serve to fill in where the gap is.

But anyway, here's a look at some of the final product drying outside in Saturday's very nice weather:

Almost Done: My Major Art Project

Okay, so this isn't really related to roleplay gaming, but it is medieval-ish.  Several years ago I went with the family on a trip to southern Germany for a Girl Scout conference.  While there we made a side trip to see the famous gothic revival Neuschwanstein castle.  The interior was a fabulous masterpiece of the decorative arts.  After I got back I decided that I was going to re-create a bit of that at my "castle".  While in the home supply store one day I noticed some moldings with the egg-and-dart motif.  The half-covered "eggs" looked just like shields--and I decided then and there that I was going to do a project of painting detailed heraldric coats of arms on the eggs and adding a lot of gold for extra effect.  I'm finally done with the main painting on the shields and the gold edging (and yes it took forever).  I still have the final fine detailing to do on a lot of the shields but here's a sample of what they all look like now:

Next up is a large Chinese-themed painting, but I need to finish this project to make room to work on it.

Map: Tomb Temple of the Handfasted Wizards

Okay, so I've decided to do a rather more ambitious map than the one I did for Secret Santicore and an earlier small one.  I've done a larger map than before and experimented with some new techniques.  I drew the map on 0.25 inch blue-lined graph paper, scanned it in with the scanner's sepia tone setting, then added the spraypaint shading in Paint.  Simple techniques but a decent result.  The story I whipped up for it uses deities from the Forgotten Realms/Faerun campaign setting.

Tomb Temple of the Handfasted Mages

Long ago the wizard Geldross and the wizardess Emeniana fell deeply in love.  Their romance began when they were studying magic at the same school and remained strong right until the end.  Not being inclined towards most religions they joined their lives together in a traditional handfasting ceremony rather than a religious rite.  Later in life they settled down in the small town of Aplennburg high in the mountains.  By then they were powerful wizards and had several loyal followers who were themselves very accomplished.  The pair soon came to be the de facto rulers of Alpennburg and the surrounding valleys.  The people looked to them for protection and advice for both were adept in magic and studied many other sorts of lore and knowledge besides.  The lovers gradually took up the worship of Mystra, Azuth, and Savras, these being the deities most closely associated with lore and magic, and built a combined temple to all three deities in the town.  The temple had with it a school for local children and a small library to spread knowledge.

Eventually they grew old and used their magic to build themselves a tomb in secluded mountain dell.  The tomb was designed with a crypt for each of them and shrines to the three deities of knowledge and magic.  The location was revealed only to their closest followers.  At last the two died, the first of old age and the second soon after of grief and despair.  Their followers used magic items prepared ahead of time to secretly convey the bodies to the tomb, activate certain magics, and seal the entrance.  The followers then took over ruling the town and neighboring valleys, calling the small territory the Mountain Magehold.  Due to its secluded location the tomb remained undiscovered for many long years.

The Map

Urbancrawl Rules for Slacker DMs: Chinese Takeout Style

Okay, so I occasionally drop by Zak S.'s blog "Playing D&D With Porn Stars" to see what he's got going on.  Zak is a weirdo--in a good way (I think).  He comes up with almost surreal ideas.  Some I don't really like, some I don't really understand, but some are really brilliant.  (This post is about one of the brilliant ones, BTW)

Today I stumbled on a very old post of his called Urbancrawl Rules for Slacker DMs.  Sometimes RPG blogs have really interesting posts (hint, hint), but I digress.  Anyway the Urbancrawl Rules are a way to run an urban sandbox "hex crawl" without any real prep other than the cool map which is not exactly a map.  He starts by spelling out the numbers ONE through TEN in huge letters clustered together and somewhat distorted on a page.  The letters are linked and the lines of the letters become the major thoroughfares.  [Check out the pics on his post and you'll see what I mean.]  But the problem is that once you have the city "map" underway, it's still obviously the words for one through ten.  Cool when you first look at it as a concept, and a cool tool for DMs, but I think the final map will look dorky and preschoolish to anyone else.

Ah, but what if you used the Chinese characters for the numbers instead of English words?  Well first let's take a look at those characters:

• 一
• 二
• 三
• 四
• 五
• 六
• 七
• 八
• 九
• 十

Hmm, the problem compared with the English words (or most other languages with an alphabet) is that there are far less lines to work with to make streets.  You could just make the characters bigger to fill the space and just say that the lines are huge royal boulevards or canals or something.  But it won't look anywhere as busy and intricate.  Luckily, Chinese has a second, fancier version of each character for use in accounting because they are harder to alter fraudulently:

• 壹
• 贰
• 叄
• 肆
• 伍
• 陸
• 柒
• 捌
• 玖
• 拾

Ah, much better! Now, Zak seems to like dropping dice on pages or charts to get results.  So I cut some 3x5 index cards in half and drew these accounting style characters on them.  Then I dropped them on a piece of blank paper to get random orientations, rearranged them slightly to link up and glued them onto the paper:

Hmm, not too bad.  Of course to me it still looks like a jumble of Chinese words.  But to someone who doesn't know characters it's probably a random oriental collage art thingy.  Next is to put a piece of tracing paper on top (yes, there are paint programs, but I like hands-on art) and trace and extend the lines, making sure to trace each character in a separate color.

I'll get to that in a later post.

Inspiration From Art - Christophe Vacher

Okay, so recently I came across a fantastic site/blog on Tumblr called Defenestrador which is chock-full of cool fantasy art.  And not just any art but really top quality works.  In the past I didn't really link artwork together with my gaming, except what was in the monster manuals, etc.  But a couple years ago as I was casting around for material for a new campaign world I discovered Deviantart.com (yes, I know, sounds like a porn site, sigh) for some brain candy.  I did indeed find a lot of cool stuff, some to show the players at the table, but most to spark ideas for world-building.

So, on Defenestrador's site I came across this magnificent work by Christophe Vacher entitled Stormbreakers:

I love the huge primal-looking ship coming through the clouds with lightning arcing off it.  I'm very glad it's not another crappy "pirate ship in the sky" like too many similar works.  Instead it looks like it's made of solidified clouds or rock and its dimensions are clearly not simply a direct ripoff of historical ship designs.  It does not look like the manufactured work of regular humanoid races.  I thought to myself how cool it would be to have the players see this primal vision passing by early in a campaign and then much later have them go aboard for some epic mission!

In the campaign world I'm building there is a sky-god and a god of the oceans (two the the five major nature deities).  So from this painting I'm thinking that once long, long ago the sky god expressed admiration for the beautiful sailing vessels crafted by the original mortal races.  Pleased that crafts inspired by his oceans had drawn such praise, the ocean god took mists, waves, and corals and fashioned a huge sky-canoe as a gift for the sky-god.  The sky-god named it Stormbreaker and gave it sails of living storms and rigging of lightning to make it fly.  Stormbreaker has sailed the skies ever since, wreathed in clouds and lightning.  It is semi-intelligent and is almost as much a pet as a possession of the sky-god.  The deity usually lets it wander as it wills, usually high in the skies, but when angered may send it as a warning to mortals.

I was also thinking that this unique vessel might also have the special (unique?) ability to pierce the Dome of the Sky which covers the world and protects it from the boiling primal elemental chaos beyond.  Thus at some point in an epic campaign, the heroes will need to approach the sky-god to use the Stormbreaker to leave the world and sail out into the elemental chaos--perhaps over to another similarly domed world or to confront elemental beings.


So there is an example of how I take art which I find inspirational and use the visions to spin into game ideas.