Game Chef 2010: My entry

The ingredients this year instantly made me think of my time in Egypt. The Theme this year is Journey, and the 3 ingredients I'm working with are Edge, City, and Desert. This will be a game about a tribe of people on the edge of survival, trying to survive in the desert.

My Game Chef Thread can be found here if you're interested in following the contest.

From start to finish

I thought I'd document the creation of a finished piece that I blogged about previously. It wound up being an excellent example of how happy accidents can conspire to make art better. (WARNING: Photoshop jargon ahead)

So after the last post, I attempted to clean up the lineart for the robot and insert him into the drawing. But I was very unhappy with how it was turning out. I decided that the old design of the robot was just to simple to mesh well with the intricacy of the rest of the piece. So I went back to the drawing board, re-designed the robot, and then put him into the drawing. And lo! It worked! Adding the myself and the margarita glass was quite easy after that.

So, the finished lineart of the piece:

I knew that I wanted the piece to be colored, but that I wanted something that was deliberately non-realistic. I had a vague notion that I wanted to do flat colors with a washed out color palette, so I started coloring. Several hours later, I had this:

It was a good start, but the coloring didn't look quite finished. It looked too much like a coloring book, and didn't convey the dream-like quality that I was aiming for. I wanted to add some grungy textures underneath the color layer on a low opacity, to try to give it a foggy feel.

So I dug up some textures (parchment, rust, and daguerreotype) and set out to make a texture layer. My goal was to create the texture layer UNDER the color layer at a low opacity, then set the color layer over it to multiply so that the texture would be seen faintly through the color layer. But instead, I wound up moving the texture layer OVER the color layer and wound up with this:

This was awesome! I knew right away that this was closer to what I had been looking for. It captured very well the feeling of unreality that I wanted to convey. But I thought it might have been closer to black and white movie than to "dream-like". And I'll admit that after all that time spent painstakingly coloring in the color layer, I didn't want to just toss it out the window. So I set the color layer over the textures at 50% opacity with the blending set to overlay, which resulted in this:

Now I was stuck. Both the colored and non-colored versions were awesome! After a while, I came to the conclusion that the colored version was closer to what I had wanted. So I decided to make one last change and call it done; I had wanted the robot to be holding a light-pole, but it just looked like a metal bar of some sort. So I added a lamp, tweaked the blending a little bit to make sure there wasn't anything it was missing, and then saved this version:

This turned out to be so successful that I decided I definitely want to make a series of it. And since my dreams are so bizarre, if I start recording my dreams again I will have no shortage of material!

It's going to be tough deciding which of my dreams to illustrate next. I've had a list of dreams that I've wanted to do this for for a long time. We'll see what happens when I start doing sketches for the next one.

Fog excursion

Last night, I went to go take out the trash and I stumbled into a wonderland of fog. It was so amazing I went inside, grabbed my camera, and told my husband that we were going for a walk, despite that it was after 1am on a Saturday evening.

Now, fog is very challenging to shoot in - especially at night. You can't see very much detail through the viewfinder, so you have to use your knowledge of what is there to mentally compose shots in the viewfinder with the elements you can see. You also have no idea if your camera is interpreting the light levels correctly. And there's always the risk that the camera isn't going to pick up all the detail that you can see so clearly. Plus I was pretty tired, so I didn't want to mess with the tripod.

I got lucky last night, though. A lot of shots turned out, even though many others didn't. I'd definitely like to do something with some of these, but I'll have to de-grain them first.

All in all, I got some great stuff. Take a look:

I love the sweep of the headlights here.

I totally expected zombies to attack us at any time. Totally.

You can't see it, but we were very near the highway, so there were these monstrous tall lights to light the highway. Kit and I kept joking about lights in the sky, since you couldn't even see the poles. So I got him to pose for a silly shot of him being "abducted".

Again, the tall lights are the lights next to the highway.

We kept joking that the rendering servers had crashed.

My photography instructors always said that the key to good night photography is to capture different kinds of light sources to get different color shifts. It's funny how lights that look white or yellow at night shift so radically "on film".

Spooky!

This picture took so long to take I had totally dismissed it as lost. I was delighted that it came out.

On Facebook, a friend left the comment that this photo made him feel like he was playing Left4Dead. I found that amusing.

Willows + fog = awesome.

Kit liked posing in the fog.

Coming back, the street outside our house.

An amusing side project

A friend of mine is having her first book published soon, and the person who was originally going to put her cover together had to bail out at the last minute. She asked if I could take the photo that had already been manipulated, add a neon sign, and put together a simple cover with title and her name.

I wound up doing two different versions, as the photo I was given was horizontal and I wasn't sure how cropped she'd want it. Since I had extra space to play with, I made myself some custom splatter and set it as a multiply layer over a free rust texture I grabbed off the internet and... voila!

I do have to admit that I added the line break in the middle of the title to assuage my angst about the lack of an oxford comma. My inner grammar nazi strikes again!

Total time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

I wish I got emergency design projects more often. This was fun!

Photography update

I've been doing a lot of photography in the last several weeks since I've been out of work in attempt to build up my landscape portfolio. I'm rather lucky in that, since I only live 45 minutes away from the Niagara Escarpment, there is no shortage of amazing scenery immediately available. Here's just some of the close to 1500 photos I've taken in the last few months.

I want to organize my porfolio a bit more, but the plan is to apply to around 20 Toronto galleries before the end of the year. I've talked about doing fine art photography long enough - now it's time to put my money where my mouth is.

I'm not dead...

Black Sky is occupying rather a lot of my attention. I've finished drafting v1.1 and need to break it again so I can move on to v1.2. I'm very happy because this looks like a game I can actually finish, unlike Delta Choir.

Anyway. I've determined that I WILL finish the cover for Showdown in the next week. Here's a small snippet of where I'm at:

As I mentioned to Seth in my email, the trick will be making him read as "pirate" and not "redcoat" (a lot of it is in the hat). Still, having fun with this one!

Showdown cover - work in progress

Not too long ago I started coloring the cover of Showdown, got something I really liked, and then screwed up the file. I couldn't bring myself to work on it right away again, but tonight I fired up my computer and got about a third of the way through coloring the cover.

I thought I'd post some images of the work in progress, just to give a sense of the progression.

I'm very excited. This is going to be quite awesome.

EDIT: I worked on it a bit more, so I decided to add one more image:

Some recent-ish sketches - more to follow

So my first week of real unemployment began today. In addition to using this time to search for new jobs, I plan on working creative projects with money-making potential. Hopefully you'll see more about that here.

For now, I'll just post some recent-ish marker sketches that I did.

One of the forces of anti-productivity that I will have to work to control now that I am out of work is WoW. My husband and I recently fell off the wagon after three years of not playing MMOs and reactivated our WoW accounts. Naturally, Kit started bugging me to draw our characters.

This is my character, Keirasti Moonpride. She's a hunter, because I must play an archer no matter which MMO I'm playing. And I would like to state for the record that Kit had to make me redraw the ears to be longer. So even I, with my obsession with pointy ears, think that Blizzard is taking it too far.

This is Kit's character - Alaillea. I'm happy that I was able to make all brown look interesting.

This is a drawing that's been lying around for a month or so. Sometimes when I'm bored I'll go back and color old drawings in my sketchbook - and this was one of those instances. I like how it turned out.

Christmas doodle

I've got quite a bit of sketching that I'm obligated to do over the next few days, and I might post things here depending on how rough the sketches are. In the mean time, here is a marker sketch for a present to my brother and sister-in-law. We're donating to a local nature trail in their area.

I only spent about half an hour with pencil and marker, but I thought it came out cutely.

My parents aren't leaving until tomorrow. But after that I have some sketching to do for Seth Ben-Ezra's Showdown as well as logo sketches for a play. Hopefully I'll be able to get them all done on Monday, but we'll see.

Art from our D&D Campaign

Kittens are terrible for productivity, let me say that now. I've had to force myself to work on the demo kit for the convention. And working on the angel game? Forget it. How can I possibly do work with two adorable fluff balls thundering around the house?

Well, I finally started doing some drawing again - despite my husband teasing me that I had to re-learn how to draw. I wanted to draw our characters for our game of 4th Edition D&D.

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This is Valeria, my Eladrin Wizard. I'm very much enjoying 4th Edition's take on Wizards, especially since I rolled really well and she wound up with super-high casting stats. She's a rock star!

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This is Zarin, my husband's Ranger. Zarin is, possibly, the most badass character EVER. He has a higher kill-count than the rest of the party, almost. And of course, he's an elf - so how could I resist drawing him? I will probably color him at some point, because he is very, very yummy.

So more D&D drawings will probably follow, since I feel mildly obligated to draw the whole party (though whether I do or not is another story.) Hopefully I'll get some interesting illustrating jobs after GenCon since it's been a while.

Finally between projects

On Friday, Thou Art But A Warrior officially went to press. Hurrah! I wish that means I could work on my black ops angel game, but moving is going to take precedence. We take possession of our new house on the 27th and are currently up to our eyeballs in boxes.

All of my art supplies are currently packed, so it'll be a bit before you see any art around here that's not me spending a few minutes goofing around on Eat Poop U Cat. I could explain this, but I think it's funnier out of context.

TABAW is almost finished! Also, I'm going to hell.

So work is proceeding apace on Thou Art But A Warrior. It looks like I will meet my self-imposed printing deadline, so - hooray! Thank god the end is in sight.

I've been taking much-needed breaks by visiting Eat Poop U Cat. Thou Art But A Warrior is so full of Serious Thought that sometimes I need to look at something silly like Batman in women's underwear to relieve the stress.

Tonight I took a longer break and drew a panel, for which I am totally going to hell. I mean, generally Eat Poop U Cat will make me go to hell, but this really will.

If you think that's twisted, here's the sentence it's based on: "The children's suspicions were confirmed--Uncle Mort sliced further into his stump of an arm anytime his miniature hippopotamus needed to be fed."

I laughed almost the entire time I drew it. Ah, good times. Good times.

Silly five minute drawing

I blame Vincent for the following bit of oddity.

Over on his blog, he linked to a site called Eat Poop U Cat, which is basically a graphical version of broken telephone. (Go check it out. It's very amusing.)

I was intrigued, signed up, and was giving the prompt: Even Darth Maul himself was unprepared; as he unleashed the deadly power of the boom-box half his face melted right off. How could I resist that? So I did the following sketch in Open Canvas.

I call this pure awesome.

It's amazing how much I've managed to avoid working on Thou Art But A Warrior the last few days, between stuff like this and working on my angel game. Ah well.

Last color illustration finished

Layout has been pretty torturous so far. For some reason the fact that I'm designing for print has made everything I learned in University fly right out of my head. Makes me wonder why I spent $20,000 to get a degree in design if it can fall out of my brain that easily. But thankfully, Joshua Newman has been kind enough to give me some pointers that will hopefully get me going in the right direction.

I finished the last color illustration - hooray! And it is, even if I do say so myself, awesome.

You'll note that I previously mentioned this would be on the cover? Well, I lied. I tried to the other half of the image with cowering Muslims and all, and it sucked. I hated it SO HARD. So I decided to adapt one of my other images into a cover and to make this an interior illustration because, well, I already did all that work on this half after all.

So slaving continues. Meanwhile I have a game I'd much rather be working on which, amusingly, also involves angels (but in a totally tongue-in-cheek way). God willing I'll have this finished by my self-imposed deadline of the end of June, but we'll see.

Getting ready for Publication

A couple of things. Firstly, I just got back from Camp Nerdly, which was amazing. I was lucky enough to get in one final playtest of Thou Art But A Warrior, and it went very well. Jason Morningstar posted a thread over on Story Games which doesn't do the game justice, but it's definitely one of those "you had to be there" types of games.

Also, I'm very glad the playtest happened because I discovered a strange loophole in the code of conduct that determines experience. Apparently you can do all the horrible shit to your family you want as long as your family isn't Muslim. Whoops! That needs to be fixed.

So much thanks to Nick Marshall, Clinton Nixon, Jason Morningstar, and Rachel Walton for bringing the awesome to Camp Nerdly. And Jason says he's going to try and get the Durham 3 (4?) to play Thou Art But A Warrior in the future, so awesome!

Second, I'm getting to the point where I'm finishing layout and illustration for the book. My goal is to have illustrations done and a draft layout with the few minor changes implemented done by the end of next week. We'll see if that goal is achievable. At the very latest, I want to be printing the third week of June, because god only knows what could happen with shipping cross-border to IPR.

The cover illustration is coming along nicely. No, the colors on the angel will be changed. The reference materials I found had red and green, and I'm initially wanted to match the colors of the reference materials. But then I decided that, you know, considering this is mostly targeted at gamers who are - by and large - not Muslim, I don't want to have a Christmas angel on the cover of my book.

Here's how it's coming so far:

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(I'll probably change the green to a more teal-y color rather than change all the red.)

Once I finish illustrations, I don't know that I'll have a lot of time to do other artwork while I'm doing the layout of the book. Hopefully it won't take up too much time, but having heard horror stories about layout from lots of designers, I'm not keeping my fingers crossed.

The finish line is in sight!

Lastly, I paid Ron for a spot in the Forge booth yesterday so it is now official. Thou Art But A Warrior will be released at GenCon this August. Now that I've turned in my money, I don't have much of a choice!

Marker sketches

I've been working on improving my marker technique recently by going back and coloring mostly-finished sketches in my sketchbook.

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This is actually a concept sketch for the as-yet-unnamed webcomic. This was mostly a color test.

This is my character from our current game of In a Wicked Age, Baila - the war sorceress. IaWA has been all kinds of fun, and I've gotten to do lots of fun things with Baila - including spawning a demon baby! Whee!

I'll probably wind up pirating certain aspects of this design for a character in the webcomic.

Thou Art But A Warrior Illustrations, Part Two

These are the other two color illustrations I've finished for Thou Art But A Warrior. I'll probably keep it to three for the interior, to keep costs down since it's going to be a short book. But I'm super-happy with how they turned out.

My goal is to make TABAW a very art-rich text. With me doing all the layout, game design, and art, all it costs me is time after all!

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I tried to vague up the angel's clothing, simply because I couldn't find any good resources for artwork of Islamic depictions of angel clothing. Oh well. It turned out pretty badass anyway. (Though the wings were a trial.)

The colors took forever to get right with this one. Super-saturated colors are hard to work with. But I like the result. Very dramatic.

That's all that I've got for TABAW for the time being, but I've got tons of other things I've been working on - including the long-planned webcomic. I've started scripting pages, so I'll be posting concept art for that now that I feel confident this is a project that will see the light of day.