If you are unfamilliar with Lois McMaster Bujold or the Vorkosigan Saga, enjoy the silly doodle and have a nice day.

If you are familliar, and happen to remember some of the specifics of the political history of Barrayar, you may find this as funny as I do.

If you follow this blog, you’ve probably figured out that I enjoy imaginary animals. Particularly those of the ‘stitched together’ variety.

But you may never have heard of this one: A lamassu (or alad, or shedu or aladlammu) is a guardian deity from the area we now call Iraq. Different cultures depict them with slightly different iconography and with slightly different purpose, but perhaps the best known version is the one of the Assyrians, who put huge carvings of them at the entrances of their cities.

It is a silly little picture that takes itself entirely too seriously, but I was so pleased with the wings and background that I thought it was worth sharing. Unfortunately I couldn’t manage to get the head/neck attachment right. I think if the beard were not a requirement I could work something out with the primary muscles of the neck, but with them obscured there’s just not much I can do about it.

I realize there’s been a bit of gap since my last communique, but that’s because this is my 200th post.  Noticing that resulted in a nasty case of the Specials: I was struck with the sudden need to do something memorable… something special.  Which completely got in the way of making the damn post.

But hey, 200th post! And I have something very pretty to show for it.

I wanted to do something similar to an old piece I was very proud of at the time, both to try to do something awesome again, and to see how far I’ve come. You guys remember the first post-apocalyptic lady? This is like that, but more awesome. In part because this time the set up is better. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with your basic near-futuristic world weary lady warrior, but I think the idea of a private school punk who learned to survive after the bombs fell to be a lot better of a story. I mean, the husk of a dead city? The gattling gun/shillelagh dual wield? The ratty plaid skirt? This is a moment in a narrative, not just a moody girl in armor. (Not to insult the long and occasionally glorious tradition in illustration of brooding females with accouterments of implied violence.)

It’s also just flat better stylistically. Last time, I couldn’t build anything non-organic from scratch, I didn’t have a great grasp of texture, and an extremely simple angle for the lighting. This time? The only time I really needed to have reference in front of me constantly while I was making it was for the gattling gun. I made the scree field by hand, and I’m much better with texture. Still not totally happy with my texture technique though- Mr Donkey looks a little sandblasted rather than furry, but I was getting testy by that point and it was time to be done.

I am a lucky person. In addition to occasionally donating his computer skills when I need them, my webmonkey also brews beer.

Beer.  Which I get to drink for the low low price of occasionally helping him put proto-beer in bottles.

I felt like I needed to even the scales a bit, and my recent illustrator kick gave me a lovely excuse to do so. I knew I’d need some sort of iconic figure to be the visual focus, so I borrowed the goat I’d made for him previously.  Then I determined what words needed to be on the label, and built from there.

The label is perfectly passable as-is, but I am most pleased about how I made it: the right way. It will be very easy for me to go back and change the colors and the text in the banner to make new labels for each different kind of beer he makes, without having to re-invent anything.

Postscript: We are rapidly approaching my 200th post. I’d like to spend it answering questions about process, photoshoppery, chainmail, or anything else that’s on your mind! Leave me a quick comment, and I’ll respond in my anniversary post next week.

When I first decided to do a blog, I promised myself that I would write it for me: If people read it, great, but that wouldn’t be the point.

For the most part I’ve managed to keep that promise. Which means that when my blog brings me something awesome, it is awesomeness + the delightful surprise that someone actually reads this thing.

I received an email not too long ago. Lauren and Mark Goodman are opening a village pub in Hertford Heath (in England guys. That means they’re classy.) on December first, called The Goat. Lauren had been poking around the internet looking for logo ideas, had found my goat post, and was wondering if I would be willing to develop one of them into a logo for her.

Um, YES. (Lauren’s offer of an ale on the house should I ever get out to England wasn’t the primary factor in my decision to take the job, but… English ale. And home cooked pub grub. These are not things one dismisses lightly.)

It’d been a while since I’d done a proper logo design, so I had to dust off my Illustrator skills. Although it was more like a long neglected outdoor grill than a misplaced tchotchkie… steel wool and a respirator, not a feather duster.

I hadn’t used Illustrator since I got my tablet, and that makes for a very different user interface. Mostly a much less frustrating one. Since this turned out so well, (and with a minimum of pulling my own hair out) I am suddenly I am getting ideas for projects that should be done in Illustrator.

I feel an artistic tangent coming on.

D’aw. Baby space turtle.

This young A’tuin sponsored by personal new beginnings. I won’t bore you with the details, (the specifics of other people’s revelations are rarely as fascinating as they seem to the person experiencing them) but I felt like celebrating/sharing with you anyway.

If you have no idea why there is a sea turtle with elephants on its back balancing what appears to be a platter of world-pie on their heads or why the whole shebang seems to be in outer space… Honestly I’m a bit surprised you read my blog. Everyone has a different opinion which book to start with the in the Diskworld Series, but this would probably be a good place to begin.

Now then, were where we?

Ah yes. Quillboar.

I tried something a little different here to try to save myself time on the background, and pretty much robo-failed. It took longer than it would have to just draw it from scratch, and it wound up looking like I ran a simple filter over a screenshot. Dammit.

Strangely enough, the thing I was most worried about turned out just fine. I’m talking about the quills of course. With simple color change along the length of the quill I was able to take care of the ‘depth’ problem without spending lots of time drawing the shade and shadows of each individual spike.

And once again my subtlety rises up to bite me. The difference between the well-lit portions and the dark bits on the figures is about half what it should be. The shadows just aren’t deep enough. I could justify it by saying they’re in a poorly lit space, but in the interest of learning I really shouldn’t. Justifying after the fact is not the same as doing it on purpose in the first place.

We interrupt your irregularly scheduled program ‘The Other Guys’, to bring you…

Goats!

Once in a great while, my webmonkey affords me the opportunity to pay him back for all his, uh, monkeying. In this case, he wanted a logo. A goat logo. He gave me a few specifics (headshot, simple, black lines) but essentially left me free to see what I could come up with.

So I got some reference material together, and started riffing on the concept of ‘goat’. When I finished my first page of sketches (the first six designs here) I showed them to my client to get his opinion on how things were going. He sort of flapped his arms and said ‘More cartoon-y! Fewer lines! Also that one in the middle on the second row is super creepy!’

In order to reduce the creep factor, I started my second page drawing mainly goats with regular pupils (instead of the weird football pupils goats actually have) and I did my best to inject some cute. I’m not actually very good at cartoons, ‘cute’ is about as close as I get.

Luckily for me, the second page of sketches produced a winner. With a little adjusting and cleaning up, here he is:

Sorry for the radio silence everyone, but I have a totally legit excuse: I moved!

And not just a little move, oh no. This was one of them ‘buy an air mattress because the truck with your stuff on it may not get there for a week’ kind of moves. So I am now officially in the Boston area. I’ve been told means I need to start caring about sports teams. Or at least learn to say ‘Bruins’ in a heavy tone and slowly shake my head at appropriate intervals.

But that shit’s not why you come here! I hear you clamoring for your pretties, even through the intertubes.

Holy Backgrounds Batman!

I may have gotten a little carried away here. I was worried about the background being the weakest part of the drawing, so I did it first. By the time I was doing finishing touches on the Furbolg I was to the ‘stinky thing go away’ stage, and neglected the details a bit.

The cobblestones turned out way better than expected, with minimum pain. I used the stained glass filter on my roughly colored path to chop it into ‘stones’, and then squished it to add perspective and a bulge in the middle, as cobblestone seems to do that over time. Then I colored highlights and shadows on individual stones, using the filtered copy layer as a guide. Then I deleted the filter layer, leaving only my highlights and shadows layer and the rough background underneath. BAM.

I’m also pleased with the mushroom clusters, they provide a lot of the feeling of undergrowth without a lot of time investment. (I’ll admit to a little copy/paste/flip horizontal/scale) Plus the glowing spots did pretty much exactly what I wanted them to.

I like the fuzzyness on the Furbolg, but some of my color choices are a bit wonky. His skin tone is too yellow, and the teeth-jewelry looks plastic rather than weathered. I also like how I made the band of his loincloth disappear under his fur, even if I forgot to extend the effect around his belly which leaves that part looking strangely flat.

It’s one of those ‘this part’s good, but it’s not good enough to overcome that part, which is BAD’ kind of pictures. It’s a learning experience. *twitch*

Despite them being, well, nasty little creatures, I enjoy Kobolds. They have simple priorities, and all the little things about their character design are consistent with the singleminded pursuit of those priorities. The backpack for holding various shiny objects they might find, (which is overfull, don’t want to spend time going back to the surface until you just can’t carry any more) badly patched clothes, the barely functional pickaxe, and the candle on the head, necessary for underground work when you can’t possibly occupy a hand (vital for grabbing loot) with carrying a torch.

As usual, I started with the figure. But I ran into a problem when I tried to make a background. I tried several different mineshaft settings, but nothing seemed to really be working. I wanted it to be dim, both because pre-industrial mines are dim, and also to keep the figure at the forefront. But then I tried to put normal shadows on the figure, and everything started to look very confused.

As usual, the solution is simplicity. Murder your darlings. (Of couse, as you may have noticed, in explaining this principle I managed to show you the full, unshadowed figure anyway.)

I’m also trying to figure out how glowing works. I’ve got a good handle on coloring with a directional lightsource, but the flame itself looks…solid. It would be fine if it were a lantern, but it’s a shame that one of the natural focal points of the drawing came out a little awkward.