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.

Having already done one character sheet, I had a pretty good idea of how this one should go. Which was a good thing, because children are hard.

Particularly this one. Eris is in latest, most gangly childhood, which I think makes her about eleven years old. This is the skinniest she will ever be, but she also has an adult-size head on a child-height body. Which kind of makes her look like a pez dispenser.

But the challenges I’ve set for myself don’t end with Eris being a child. I’ve also made her mixed race.

Comic artists handle racial indicators in different ways. The simplest is of course just to use color. But I want my comic to be done, oh, this decade, so I’m mostly going to be sticking to black and white.

In black and white, there are three options: Blackface (awkward), hashmarks, (which generally looks like some kind of skin condition) and actually being goddamn good at your job and drawing faces with a specific shape to them.

So… I’m trying to go with that last one.

Welcome to the final Other Guy! (Other Guys? Others? Hell with it.)

I was really, really looking forward to this one, and not just because it’s the last. A color palette I like, a species I like (with spots!) and I get to play with glow-y effects? Oh hell yeah.

The water doesn’t so much look like water, but there’s a limit to what you can do when it’s supposed to look flat, muddy, and purple. The little green mushrooms could use more definition (aka darker shadows… again. I swear, I’ll learn one of these days.) and the balloon-tree thingies in the far background have neither treelike or ballonlike qualities. I am however happy with the misty effect. Given that the balloon-trees came out a bit weak, I sort of wish I’d made the mist more impenetrable.

But this is one of those times where the figure came out much better than the background. I gave him deep enough shadows, the skin color variation all makes sense, and his little whiskers are pretty freaking adorable. I had to re-do his toes and hands about three times. They aren’t great, but they don’t stand out as bad anymore, which I’ll take.

And I’m happy to report that on the very last illustration in this series I grokked a new technique. I can reliably make things glow. Now all I have to do is resist the urge to come up with excuses to use my new skill for no reason.

…

Radioactive special! All commissions with a glowing element 10% off!

It’s all right. You can say it.

Nerubians are icky.

They have several different equally icky body plans. So many in fact that getting them all in one illustration was a little awkward logistically, so I’m only showing two of the more common types that the average adventurer may run into.

Again, there are things I like about this one, and things that make me sigh. (I’m getting better. Sighing is a big step up from disquieting giggling.) In trying to relax about my color transitions, some things are fuzzier than they should be, which gives the whole picture a sort of dreamlike quality. Which would be cool, if I that was in any way what I meant to do.

And my color choice is too close in contrast. Again. The leg red, body brown, and purple wrappings have basically the same brightness, which makes them difficult to differentiate at a distance.

But I like the spiderlings.  They’re alternately cute and horrifying, with good contrast and color. They’re adorable. Just, um, keep ‘em away from me.

See, the reason this post is late is ’cause I got sick. Actually, I’m still sick. I sound like one of those bubbling mudpots at Yellowstone every time I cough. It’s attractive.

Uncharacteristically, I’d built myself up a little backlog of illustrations in case of just such an event, smiling smugly to myself about how good I’m getting at planning ahead and generally acting like a professional.

Then I couldn’t sit at the computer for a week. So much for my brilliant plan.

This week we have a Gorlock, specifically one of the Oracles. I love these guys. They’re cute, in a horrible sort of way. They have the personality of your three-year-old cousin who idolizes you, but in addition to the biting problem, amorality, bug eating, being generally slimy and nominally house-trained, they also… uh… Huh. I guess some of the game developers have kids.

I’m really very pleased with the color on this one. The critter is green and purple and yellow, but instead of being garish I managed all of the transitions so it just looks like a sorta greenish-brown. Which is of course how actual animals are- rarely is something just brown, it’s a complicated and intense palette of colors that you’re generally too busy appreciate. But you notice it when someone tries to substitute plain ol’ brown.

I’m also pleased with how the sketching lines came out in the final product, even if I’m not sure I’ll keep them on in subsequent drawings. They’re damn useful, and add a certain character, but when I get to the final touches they seem to bring down the quality of the picture. We’ll see.

From the WoWiki:

Gorlocs are “an arctic race of murloc-like creatures” that battle the tuskarr. This can be seen in the Borean Tundra.

They are said to be the “next evolution of murlocs.” Lead Game Designer Jeff Kaplan called them “an evolution to the murlocs” and said they were a “complicated race of murloc, both good and bad at the same time”.

The Oracles are a faction of several friendly gorloc tribes that inhabit Sholazar Basin. They see themselves as guardians of the titan technology that remains in the area (though they understand little of it). They find themselves in an escalating territorial war with the Frenzyheart Tribe of wolvar.

So I gave in to my tendencies and made a very, very blue dragon. Well, I guess he’s sort of violet, but it’s balanced by the super-cute teal belly.

And he has pads! Eeeeeeee!

*Cough* Sorry. Regulations require at least one squeal per use of adorable paw pads.

Okay, so I’m probably out of inventiveness as far as titles go.

I’m playing with texture a bit here. It’s subtle (and what do we know about subtlety?) but I like the concept anyway. I was trying to get the skin of the body to have a different taste than the armor scales. ( Due to my synesthetic brain, taste, textue and color are all very closely intwined. Actually, there’s a sound component too, but when I get that far in a discription most people start to get incredulous.) I don’t think I quite have it here, but it’s an interesting thought anyway.

I think this is my best expression so far. The face is cute, sure, but it’s the pose that really does it.

This one went through a few different color changes. I knew I wanted the spots, and I wanted the tail to fade to red, but everything else was up for grabs. For a while he was a sort of grey/blue. But I use blue too often, and I know it.  So I decided to go a little more…vibrant.

Another take on quick scales. I think this one worked out a bit better, although it doesn’t follow the curves of the form as the earlier try did, and I want to fix that. But later. These little studies aren’t about driving myself crazy trying to get it perfect, and I’m finding I like how much that frees me up to experiment and learn.

Funny enough, that’s exactly what nine-dozen art teachers have been trying to get me to do for years. But I never could really do it in a class setting. (Strange thought: this is the first extended period since third grade or so that I haven’t been under some sort of standardized art instruction.) The constraints of experimenting now, on the clock and using the materials/references provided just made it so artificial that it was hard to actually be excited about learning. Worst for me though was the core concept: if you’re getting it right, you’re doing it wrong.