Exquisite Corpses v2 Update
Posted: December 10, 2011 Filed under: art, crass commercialism, exquisite corpses, monsters 8 CommentsI’ve been working on E.C. v2. and have a lot of issues/problems bubbling up. I’m not posting them here to ‘design by committee,’ I just thought it might be interesting for some people to see behind the scenes of how I do this.
If you are reading this and don’t know what Exquisite Corpses is: E.C. is a somewhat unusual monster book I published in an abbreviated form via Lulu a few years ago. In 2012 a new and improved version will be published by LotFP. The book has a lot of pictures of monsters divided into three sections (head, body and tail/legs). Each drawing is split along the seams, creating tabs you can flip back and forth to make new hybrid creatures with different heads, bodies and legs/tails. Just by flipping tabs you can create 64,000 different critters. Read more here.
Here is a picture of one of the ‘mock-ups’ (in black and white) of the old edition in use. In the pic I have put a dragon’s head on an insect’s body with a bird’s feet (the newer edition has nicer illustrations and will be in COLOR!):
E.C. Original Edition in mock-up
I have 40 paintings of creatures that I began this year. Each is about 9×12 acrylic; some are better than others. Getting the creatures to fit the format is, at times, a bit difficult. Some animals are pictured rearing up on their hind legs so they can all fit the basic profile. So, basically, it works like this:
Here we took the head of a one legged cyclops creature (I call it a “cyclopskiapod”), the body of a dragon/wyvern creature and the legs/tail of a gargoyle and added them all together to make a new creature with a one-eyed head, dragonny wings and clawed feet and a tail. The book will tell you stuff like the Cyclops head will have poor depth perception, the dragon body can fly and the gargoyle legs can grab and claw with the feet (examples). There will also be more tables that will allow you to add more qualities. You can generate your creatures by picking the parts and powers you want or rolling dice.
Right now I’m struggling to edit the text the way I want it. Each entry has to be unique and after working for a while I get tapped out of ideas, so I keep having to work on it till I am not coming up with good ideas, putting it down, coming back to it, etc. I’m hoping to have the text more or less ‘done’ by the new year.
I’m also having second thoughts about the art and am thinking of revising the paintings in favor of a more graphic presentation like this:
"NEW" Armored Fiend V2
Compare the above armored fiend to the original acrylic painting of the same monster:
"OLD" armored fiend v1
Obviously, the old ‘armored fiend v1’ has a wonky left leg that is supposed to look like he is stepping forward (I need to repaint that) and the new version is an ink drawing colored on the computer, but right now I’m grooving a lot more on the more comic-bookish new one than the painterly old one — not just because his legs are better, either — I just like the more graphic ‘look’ of it better right now. But I have to mull it over, and, of course, talk about it with my publisher. But I thought since people have been asking they might like a behind the scenes look.
BTW, an ‘armored fiend’ is a monster of my own creation — it’s basically a fanatical warrior who has had weapons and armor permanently mounted to their flesh. They never give up or surrender and it’s hard to do things like knock their weapon out of their hand because, more often than not, their weapon IS their hand. Like Edward Scissorhands but more medievalish.
Mustek A3 1200 USB Scanner
Posted: December 6, 2011 Filed under: art, comics, publishing, technique Leave a commentI ordered a new Mustek A3 1200 scanner a while ago and it just recently arrived.
There was nothing wrong with my Canon brand scanner other than it’s platen (scanning surface) was too small for most artwork, and, as a result, I had to scan things in pieces and then ‘sew’ them together in Photoshop… which is a time consuming pain. The problem of scanning in pieces is compounded by the fact that you have to keep everything straight… if one of the parts you have scanned is a little off kilter, getting it to match up right is so hard that I discovered it is actually easier to scan the whole thing over again.
The Mustek A3 1200 cost me about $160.00 (I ordered mine from Amazon where the price has also recently gone up (but is still cheaper than Mustek Direct)). The platen is large enough to accommodate a single sheet of ~17×11 inch paper (the size I have been using for my Shaver Comic book). Although the Mustek has a maximum 300 dpi resolution (much lower than the Canon Scanner I had been using), I usually end up reducing to ~63% of original size for reproduction, so the lower dpi of the Mustek becomes irrelevant since, after interpolation down to reproduction size, the Mustek’s scan is still more dpi than I need. For higher resolution scans of photographs and similar items, I’ll still have the Canon, anyway.
Looking at the cost of scanners that can accommodate an a3 size artwork, the Mustek is a bargain. Since it would normally take me at least a half hour to scan and piece together a single page of comic book art using the Canon (and 1/2 and hour assumes nothing goes wrong — other art always takes longer to scan), the Mustek will save me a huge amount of time when you multiply that by many pages. Tests for color and sharpness look fine so far.
This was my x-mas present.
Shit my Dad says…
Posted: December 5, 2011 Filed under: douchebaggery 2 CommentsSomeone's dad
Via shit my dad says:
“The Evil Underground: Chapter 2” (slightly nsfw)
Posted: November 30, 2011 Filed under: art, comics, project, publishing, Shaver, underground, weird 7 CommentsLongtime followers of the blog may remember when I presented chapter 1 of a biographical comic book I was working on about the life of Richard S. Shaver (artist, conspiracy theorist, author, paleo-archeologist, philologist and philosopher). If you haven’t yet read it, go back and read chapter 1 before you read chapter 2.
You can click on each page, below, to see a bigger version.
I’m writing the chapters as I go (which may or may not be the best way of going about this; I don’t know). The story is ‘true’ (at least from the narrator’s point of view; objective truth or whether or not Shaver was psycho are not my interest). The next chapter will probably involve Raymond Arnold Palmer and the famous “Mantong” letter.
At the current rate of production, I should have the whole thing done sometime around 2020 or so (sigh). Actually, I hope to have it done sooner, but every project I currently have on the workbench is unfinished and I’m getting a bit psycho feeling over not getting any single one done. Evil Underground/Richard Shaver Comic will come out sometime after I finish ‘Exquisite Corpses’ v2… which should be sometime early next year (I hope).
KAMANDI the Last Boy on Oerth!
Posted: November 29, 2011 Filed under: art, comics, inspiration, monsters 5 CommentsLook at this picture from O.D&D of a ‘barbarian’:
Barbarian wears boxers, not briefs
Does anyone think that if I had all the back issues of Jack Kirby’s “Kamandi” comic that I wouldn’t eventually find the image of Kamandi that K. Bell used to copy his barbarian drawing?
I love Jack Kirby’s art. And I don’t think that pointing out that K. Bell, whomever he was, traced or copied a lot of drawings from comic books is a slag on K. Bell or early TSR — K. Bell may not have been a great artist, but at least he chose great artwork to copy. And I’ll take his scribblings over the airbrushed perfection of late era TSR ‘professional grade’ calendar art illustration any day simply because I find them more entertaining to look at. If I want to admire a painter’s illusion of reality, I’ll go to the museum and look at a Titian.
Now check out this picture of Kamandi about to get chowed by a purple worm:
Run, Kamandi, run!
WTF Kindle?
Posted: November 28, 2011 Filed under: douchebaggery, Uncategorized 4 CommentsA while ago, my significant other bought me a Kindle e-reader from Amazon. I like it more than I thought I would, especially for stuff to read that is in the public domain.
One of my main complaints, however, is that if I want a book for the Kindle that I actually have to pay for, it is often cheaper for me to buy a real book (you know, one made of paper) than to get the Amazon Kindle version. I can’t imagine that in this age of easily convertible electronic documents that offering an electronic version of books represents any significant ‘cost’ for the publisher. Shouldn’t an e-book at least be cheaper than a paper version?
Also — some books are so awfully formatted (with words getting split between two lines and other typographic nightmares) that I suspect no one from the publisher bothered to look at it when it was turned into a Kindle doc and dumped on Amazon. Free books from Gutenberg don’t suffer this problem, so there is really no excuse other than laziness/incompetence on the part of the provider.
Peppersprayer
Posted: November 25, 2011 Filed under: art, comics, politics 2 CommentsToday is black friday when people go batshit crazy with their shopping.
I’m pretty sure that’s not what Jesus would have wanted.
But, in her honor, I drew this peppersprayer dude based on the campus cop who sprayed down the kids at UC Davis 4 days ago. I took some liberties… but all artists are liars by nature. My model poses below:
Sympathy for the kids at UC Davis
Posted: November 23, 2011 Filed under: art, politics, weird 2 CommentsGiven all the pepper-spray cop art floating around the web, I thought I would remind folks that I was into the pepper spray meme before anyone one else. This is a drawing I did for one of Goodman’s DCC Classics a few years ago (I don’t remember which one):
"Get outta here yah dirty hippie!"
It was from some book where there was a kitchen where this big, ugly, hairy bastard was cooking, and, when you bothered him, he would throw pepper in your face. Once again, I was ahead of my time. (Note to self: get with Goodman to do mousepads and T-Shirts and coffee cups so we can cash in on this thing.)
In related news, talking head Megyn Kelly recently opined to Bill O’Rielly that being sprayed in the face with pepper spray was ‘not that bad’ because pepper spray is ‘basically a food product.’ This makes it sound like the campus police were spraying them down with PAM. I would invite her to take a single habanero pepper and rub it on her hands, then touch her own lips, eyes and nostrils right before doing a broadcast and see how chirpy she can be with even minute amounts of this ‘food product’ on her face.
Strange Dream
Posted: November 21, 2011 Filed under: dreams, inspiration, weird Leave a commentSorta like this...
OK, this is a dream I had last night (at least as well as I can remember it).
The dream started with me playing some sort of video game. The first part of the dream took the form of a computer video game involved loading a musket. One had to select the proper tools and parts from a list (like the ramming rod, wadding, ball, powder horn and other stuff) in the proper order and drag and drop them onto the right part of the musket. I have never loaded a musket, so it felt kind of ‘educational’ to me. There were a lot of weird looking tools in the menu; I suspect some of them were just ‘red herrings’ that my subconscious inserted in there to make the game more challenging. I think if you didn’t load the musket properly, it wouldn’t fire.
The second part of the video game was what they call a ‘first person shooter.’ You are looking down the barrel of the musket across an area where there are trees, houses, etc, as well as the shore of a river. As you sit there, possible targets appear, some of which will be things that one might presumably lose points if you shoot them (fellow citizens, milkmaids, sheep, etc.,) and enemy soldiers. The goal is to shoot the enemy soldiers (who look a lot like Hessians from the American Revolutionary war) without getting shot or wasting your shots on civilians, sheep or cows. I think every time you shoot the musket, you have to load it again.
Somehow, through the magic of dream logic, suddenly it was not a video game any more. I was in the battle, and instead of a bucolic, colonial setting, I was a part of an army defending a cliff. We could see the enemy swarming up stairways and towers. We had obviously just lost the battle.
I was dressed like this but my clothing was more colorful
The dream somehow transitioned to me being a captive. A group of soldiers were walking me and a companion down a road. My friend and I were dressed up like conquistadors; jackets with puffy sleeves, helmets and breastplates. I suddenly became convinced that the enemy soldiers behind us were going to shoot us in our backs and I told my comrade this. We decided to run and advised one another to run in a zig-zag pattern to make us harder to hit. The street we were on looked like part of a neighborhood that I lived in when I was growing up. We ran down the street in our zig-zag pattern and as I was running it occurred to me that by zigging and zagging it was taking us a lot longer to get away from our enemies than if we had run in a straight line. As I considered the advantages and disadvantages of both, we continued to run. We reached a hedge and dove through to escape our enemies.
Suddenly we were rolling down a hill. I was OK with this sionce rolling head over heels down a hill in a dream didn’t seem dangerous and we were getting away from our enemies much faster. At some point I landed on my head and squashed my helmet so it no longer fit on my head. It seemed to be made of thin aluminum, but, in my waking world I have been repairing our roof which involves a lot of shingles and aluminum flashing metal, so maybe there is some connection there. My helmet seemed to have been made from aluminum flashing so I don’t imagine it was much good as a helmet, anyway.
We reached the bottom of the hill and decided that although we had evaded our enemies for now, they would be looking for us, so we needed to ditch our uniforms and dress in some other clothing. Searching through a dumpster, we found some ragged old clothes and changed. At this point we were somewhere near Williams Pharmacy (which is also near where I used to live). This seemed to make sense since Williams Pharmacy is three or four blocks north and downhill from the corner of Lindell and Asbury (where we evaded our enemies). I noticed that the pharmacy seemed to be closed and paper was taped up over the inside of the windows so you couldn’t see in.
After this we crossed a busy street and hid near some railroad tracks. I realized that my companion was actually my partner, Annie. She pointed out a mutual friend of ours, Phoebe, who was unloading some stuff from a trailer that was hooked up to her car along with some other people. The ‘stuff’ looked like furniture and boxes of personal items which they were dumping on the side of the busy street. Annie suggested that we could ask Phoebe for a ride but I didn’t want to because I was suddenly self conscious about my ragged clothing (which isn’t really like me — in real life I wear ragged clothes all of the time).
And that’s where the dream ended. Weird, huh?
Henchman Appreciation Week!
Posted: November 18, 2011 Filed under: inspiration 3 CommentsInspired by the tales of Heraphalmos from Planet Algol, this post on Swords & Dorkery, and the title of the blog, “Henchman Abuse,” I decided to see if I could start a blog meme by encouraging everyone to help celebrate next week (or, hell, this week; I don’t care) as “Henchman Appreciation Week.” Write about your favorite henchies, living and dead. Celebrate them in word and song!
Where would the dungeoneer be without the hench-people? (or hench-elves, hench-dwarves, hench-hobbits, etc) They find the traps (sometimes because of skill and training, other times, well, it’s not so pretty), carry our torches, ropes, rations, extra shields, ten foot poles and other necessary delving impedimentia, haul out treasure (and the bodies of the deceased), guard our mules, bash down doors and watch us while we sleep. They get eaten by trolls, skewered by spear traps, catch arrows that might have otherwise hit someone important and can at least be counted on to run slower than the slowest party member when a hungry owlbear is chasing you since they will be carrying that anvil looted from the goblin’s armory.
Let’s take a few moments to remember some of the humble spear carriers with poor armor classes, low life expectancy and modest XP rewards who, more often than not, end up feeding the maggots on the bottom of a pit somewhere. Since they seldom live long enough to collect their meager salaries, they are usually a better investment than that extra flask of holy water!
A few memorable henchmen from years gone by:
Skwortch: Goblin guide and bootblack. Originally pressed into service by “The Company of the Summoned Monkey,” Skwortch was never credited with bravery, intelligence or good hygiene, but after the adventurers had treated him decently he managed to overcome his own base nature and behave himself most of the time. He even prevented the party from being eaten by ghouls and helped negotiate safe passage through an underground goblin village. Unfortunately, a cursed mace made quite an impression on the diminutive goblin’s skull and his corpse was discarded without ceremony. His dreams of investing the gold given to him by the party into an ‘escort service’ scheme never came to fruit.
Jocko: Jocko was a half orc henchman who defied all expectations, and, despite seeming to have the bad luck to fall down numerous pits, get crushed by falling rocks, chopped by battle axes, etc., always seemed to have just one more hit point to spare. If memory serves, he started life as a captive freed by ‘The Furious Five.’ Given armor and weapons, he helped fight the way back to the surface, and, in gratitude, agreed to serve the party’s magic user as a body guard. After a few adventures, despite all odds, this unremarkable seeming half-orc survived. Last Iremember, he had been granted full membership in the group and was given a full member’s share of treasure.
Hop Sing: Tragic. One of the players rolled up a henchman and managed to get scores good enough to qualify for the monk class (which, in 1e, was quite unlikely). In the first fight of his first expedition, an insane bandit hit Hop Sing in the head with a club and killed him. As DM, I wasn’t that sad to see an NPC named after the Chinese cook on ‘Bonanza’ leave the game, but having Hop Sing get creamed by the first blow in the first fight of the first session in which he appeared gave his brief story a certain tragic resonance.