Thou Art But A Warrior: Help support a new 2nd edition!

After nearly three years of working on it off and on, the new revised edition of Thou Art But A Warrior is finished and ready to be published! And thanks to the generosity of Ben Lehman, the new edition contains not only the expansion rules, but also the core Polaris system rules. It also contains the new illustrations that I blogged about previously. (Um, very, very previously.)

The Indiegogo campaign to fund a print run for the new book has now gone live.I'll be blogging here about the new edition, as well as progress toward the campaign goal and any stretch goals I might wind up putting forward. Please consider throwing a few dollars my way in order to help make this happen and to keep costs low for everyone.

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.

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!

Two down, one to go!

Words cannot express how relieved I am to finally have this image done. I knew that doing a dragon properly would make my life a nightmare, but I'm so happy with how this turned out. I'm so *very* excited.

Unfortunately, the fact that I had so much trouble with the background means that I have five days to finish a fifth piece from start to finish. I anticipate working right down to the wire. But at least the finish line is in sight.

Here! Admire!

Now I just have to find a place that will do poster printing for me cheaper than CafePress. ($6 for an 11x17? Black and white only? You've GOT to be joking...)

More Kagematsu

First off, I was negligent in not linking to an excellent Playtesting thread that Ron Edwards wrote up on the Forge after our game at last year's GenCon. Though the game has gone through revisions since then, I think that you can still get a good feel for what sort of play the game creates. If you're interested, you can read it here.

Secondly, the sketch that I posted yesterday has since undergone some revisions. You can see the new version here:

And here is the other image that I promised, the one that is already finished and ready to go. It took a lot of trial and error to get right, but I'm soooo happy with how it turned out and plan on offering prints of these images at GenCon.

Trollbabe finally finished

Last two Trollbabe images finished.

I realize this is unforgiveably terse, but I'm tired and my job is slowly draining away my life force.

Another quick Trollbabe update

So I finished another Trollbabe piece and work proceeds apace on the last two. Here's the one I finished:

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I've nearly finished number four - it's about 75% complete. I've still got the rest of the troll to finish (obviously) and some finer gradation of shading to do in some parts, but this one is going pretty quickly.

We're not playing Hero's Banner again until next week, but I'm sure I'll have art then.

Trollbabe: another finished piece

Things have been really crazy lately; I've been spending time getting ready for a rank promotion test which has meant I haven't even had time for Spore, let alone art.

I did finally manage to finish Trollbabe piece.

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Two down, three to go.

Still crazy productive after GenCon

It took me a while to get back in the groove of working with hatching, but I finished my first Trollbabe drawing and consider it a success.

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I'm having a lot of fun drawing Trollbabes and am having serious thoughts about doing finished color versions of these images once I'm done doing black and white versions for Ron.

In other news I now have a second game that I'm pretty sure I'll have to write in addition to the black ops angel game that I've been working on. I blame this on Graham, as he's the one who gave me the idea. More later once I've fleshed out the idea more and am willing to talk about it.

Thank GOD. It's finished.

So the book is done. Finished. Thank God.

I decided pretty last minute that I wanted to get the title of the book calligraphed in Arabic and I am super, super, SUPER excited about how awesome it makes the cover.

So here's the cover and title page, just because they're too awesome not to share.

I'm sending the book to the printer in the morning. But no rest for the wicked; now that I'm finished with the book I get to finish packing the apartment. Oh 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.

Well now that Game Chef is up and running...

...I can post pictures of my entries! Go check out the contest over here if you're interested. There are neat things going on over there.

(Game Chef is going to keep me pretty busy until next week, so this might be it until I'm done trying to pull a game out of my brain meats in not enough time.)

They broke with tradition this year, and for ingredients had artists do sets of images to be used as inspiration for games to be designed. I picked 'women warriors' as my theme. I wound up being really, really happy with the final result. I look forward to seeing the finished games that are going to be using my artwork!

I'm happy I was adequately able to convey in black and white how absolutely garish Egyptian jewelry is. Having seen it in person in the Cairo Museum, it is rather appalling to Western sensibilities.

This was cleverly cropped to avoid showing that I suck at drawing horses.

Easily my favorite image of the whole set. I love, love, LOVE her face. She is so totally saying 'I am about to f*ck you up'.

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.

So, haven't been around much

Well, things have been hairy the last little while. I've been struggling with job issues, as well as other things, and haven't been producing much art. I'm looking to get serious about illustrations for Thou Art But A Warrior, if I can round up some playtest reports to do illustrations from. Failing that, I dusted off the old illustration to finish.

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I'm happy with how it turned out. I won't offer much more comment than that. Hopefully I'll manage to stick to my commitment to get things done.

Wrapping up some projects

So things have been busy the past few weeks. Things have been wrapping up with the script-writing committee that I'm on for the play come February - we have to be done by Christmas. But I've still been getting some work done here and there.

There was a bit of a lapse, but I did get the second to last Sons of Liberty piece done. I wound up being happy with the result, despite the crazy challenge of perspective that Joshua's description entailed.

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The following two images were the last two revised images done for Ben Lehman's upcoming game Drifter's Escape - which, incidentally looks like it will be a super-interesting game.

I've got a few more potential projects in the wings, but after I get Sons of Liberty and Drifter's Escape lined up, look to see more art from that webcomic I might do someday and from Thou Art But A Warrior. Now that I've gotten people to play some playtests, I have fodder for illustrations.