28mm Barricades - Now in colour!

After some quickie paintjob, here are my barricades, almost ready for the table. The basing is till a bit undone, as I haven't yet made up my mind just what shade my gaming board will eventually be, and I will finish these up then to mach up.

...and here are some action shots. Just because.

Hexagonal Modular Gametable: Part 1: Preliminary Designs

One of the Eternal Projects of mine has been building a game table for to be used in the Ruins and Ratmen games. The table should be small enough to fit into our living room, small also for storage purposes, of modular design for an easy setup, and the modules should contain depth, since I've always thought that a table where you can build terrain only upward lacks something. So when my wife got fed up with a round table, about one meter in diameter, my brain switched gears.

First thing to do was to trim the edges of the table, so that a hexagon remained, each side having a length of 50 cm. So the gaming surface would consist of six triangular terrain blocks, with different surface definitions on either side of the block. As the gaming setup would be that of a ruined medieval-esque city, my initial idea was to have canal sections of different layout on one side, and flat surface on the other. That setup would allow for a lot of variation when setting up the table, and yet I would initially need to make just six blocks. The hexagonal design would also give the opportunity to set up three-way battles as easily as skirmishes of two sides.

The canals would be needed to set up so that the 'end' sections would be at the middle point of the triangle sides, so that when two sections would end up side by side, it would seem that the canal was continuous, and the spot where the sections meet would look like a small bridge crossing the canal. The end part of the canal should also be designed so that it would seem to just continue beneath the surface of the tile, in effect becoming a sewer. Thus it would not matter how the different blocks were assembled, the gaming board would look natural and uniform.

Initially, my intention was to build the triangular blocks from styrofoam or some similar material, but as I was doing mock-ups of the canal walls from HirstArts blocks, I realised that styrofoam by itself might not be robust enough for this purpose. Also, the thought of cutting straight lines and 60° angles to styrofoam suddenly begun to lose its appeal. And even if I were to manage to cut the pieces right, they would be quite fragile, even if one considers just the storaging of the tiles. So, even though I am by no means a carpenter, I decided to build the tiles from wooden strips of 2"x 1", with fibreboard as the 'surface' of the tiles. The biggest challenge would of course be in keeping the angles and therefore the whole tiles uniform in shape and size, in all dimensions. And in all honesty this means that the overall construction must have some tolerance to allow for some faults during the construction, since they're inevitable, especially since I don't have access to any woodworking shop but have to rely on my meager DIY tools.

A couple of 28mm scale barricades

Having managed to increase the 'ratmen' portion of the Ruins & Ratmen -project, I was inspired to make some advancement on the first part of the name also. From the very beginning of this project, I had wanted to make some barricade-style terrain, but somehow never managed to actually make any. But after the skaven, I felt that it was time to tackle this obstacle as well. So, I cut some fibreboard to 1"x3" pieces, filed the edges round, and dived in to my parts pile to dig up some stuff to use. At first, I envisioned the the barricades to be built mainly from stones and wooden beams from the collapsed buildings, but after a while I began to want some more hastily constructed ones. It required some scratchbuilding, but soon I had a table and a couple of benches made, and the first barricade was practically done. The metal barrels and cartwheels gave the pieces some weight, in addition to adding some more interesting shapes overall, and the HirstArts small bricks and ruined fieldstone pieces anchor these terrain elements visually to the rest of the City in Ruins -style.

After the first one was done, the rest kind of just happened. The hardest part was to find a suitable figure for the dragged-down statue; I would have liked to make it with a 40mm - 1/32 scale figure, but could not find any suitable one, and in the end decided to use some old 25mm Grenadier figure. I still kind of want to do a similar set-up with a bigger figure, but I think It will be a singular terrain piece at that point.
Next step is to spray on some black basecoat, and then it's painty time!

6 Skavenslaves painted

For a blog where one big portion of content is themed Ruins and Ratmen, there has been a dearth of the latter in presentation. A big reason for this is simply that most of my Skaven figures predate this blog - well, some of them predate the Internet - although, to be honest, some of them are in a state that would need a good cleanup to be presentable. However, there were several Skaven figures on my to do -list, late arrivals and eBay finds that I just haven't gotten around to paint, and after I had finished with the Vampire spawn, I decided to give these guys a go.

If memory serves, these hail from the 6th edition of WFB. They are a little bit smaller than the bulk of my Skaven, which mostly consists of the WFB 3rd edition era Jes Goodwin figures, but don't stand out too badly and in fact help to break up the monotony of the figures. I intended to use them with WFRP, and now they are going to fill up the Trooper slots in Ruins and Ratmen.

For me, these were a quick job, finishing six figures in just a couple of evenings. Well, there was nothing fancy in the colour scheme, and they were quite small figures so I might have overlooked some tiny details. But I have to say that painting six similar figures on one go is kind if maximum for me, which does not bode well for the 9 Red Box Lesser Undead (zombies) next on the queue. Although they will have even simpler colour scheme...

Vampire Spawn (Reaper Dark Heaven 3383) painted

There are times that getting old really hits home. Like the graduation or marriages of your younger relatives, that you still thought were just kids. Or the twentieth anniversary of Nevermind couple of years back. Or the realization that no, you haven't gotten progressively worse about painting minis over the years, it's just your eyesight that is showing it's age.

Fortunately, there are steps to be taken at least about the last one. I have previously used a headband magnifier for some precision freehand stuff, now I just have to use those for most painting. It takes a bit of an adjustment, as I have never needed any kind of glasses, and have no problem of reading from print or from screen. Well, not yet, anyway. But apparently painting minis happens just at the range that is no longer naturally available for me.

Anyway, I have had my eyes on these Reaper figures for a while. However, last time I did order directly from them I had to pay customs charges, so even though they still have quite a generous free shipping offer, Reaper figures have been out of bounds for me. Luckily, there's eBay, and that's where I snatched this pair. Somehow, purchasing a couple of figures here and there does not sting as much as making a 'bulk' purchase.

I really like the sculpts of these figures. In fact, they're almost too good in depicting the over-the-top posturing and bravado of a freshly turned vampire. The figures have almost a kind of LARPish feel, and they could easily pass as some wannabe-vampires in a modern setting. I wanted a quick and simple colour scheme, and it turned up quite alright.

Formless Spawn painted

The paintwork for the Formless Spawn by Avolak Castings is pretty much done, All that is left to do is spray the whole thing with glossy varnish, and then apply matt varnish on the cobblestones. Not having done much painting recently, as this blog can also testify, I just wanted some quick and easy colour scheme, and it came out pretty much like I visioned it. In fact, the most time consuming part of this figure was building the cobblestone base. I usually tend to keep my bases minimalistic, and to that end cast them myself from a Hirst Arts Fieldstone pattern floor tiles, but here I wanted to go a bit scenic, to create the impression that the creature is bursting from beneath the  pawed street of the town. So I filed a couple of tiles to about 1/2-1/3 of their original thickness, cut them up to separate 'stones', and built the basing from those bricks. Now the base both match my other minis, and yet conveys something about the creature. I'm quite pleased with the result, although there could have been a bit more movement about the placing of the stones. Then again, it is meant to slowly emerge from beneath the surface, not to burst out violently. A bigger base might have helped, too.

But man, it was so nice to paint something for a change.

Formless Spawn by Avolak Castings

I haven't really done much at all with miniatures recently. But as I was making some random browsing for Deep Ones/Kuo-toa in miniature, I came across this guy, and was instantly smitten. Available from Avolak Castings, who have a small but impressive range of Lovecraftian miniatures. Officially it's depicting a Formless Spawn (of Tsathoggua), and I have great plans for it.

The body is tow-part resin cast, the hands and some tentacles are from metal, and everything fitted together very well. I mostly ended up pinning everything out of habit rather than need. There was some minor flash on the resin parts, actually hardly even worth mentioning, and if my aging eyes did not deceive me, a couple of air bubbles on the resin body might have been worked over with some clear filler, which was quite impressive dedication to quality. Despite all that, the whole miniature cost 12 euros, so there's tremendous value for money here. There was no real webshop on the site, but everything worked out via a couple of emails, and a professionally packed figure arrived from Spain to Finland quite speedily. And the postage did not cost arm or tentacle, either.

The figure fitted neatly on it's 50mm round base, but it would not look off on a 60mm base either, especially if one intends to do some scenic work with the base.

There are good miniatures, and then there are great ones. I had not thought of Ruins and Ratmen for a while, and yet as I saw this miniature, I a) knew that I needed to have it, and b) I instantly thought of an endgame scenario for R&R. So welcome, little guy. I hope my meagre skills can do you justice.

D&D 5th Character cards - Verity, Level 3 Warlock

Rounding up the Highcliffe City Guard, I decided to add an infiltrator-type character, the kind of that can walk amongst the underworld with ease and disappear without a trace if needs be. And these things come easy for a certain flavour of Warlock.

As the concept was a character with a shady past trying to redeem herself, giving Verity a Criminal background was almost compulsory, and it rounded up her skillset nicely. And with the Pact of the Tome, she has access to a wide variety of spells to expand the utility.

But what really makes the character shine in an intrigue and investigation type campaign are her Warlock powers and invocations. With Mask of Many Faces, she can blend in or disappear in a crowd, Gaze of Two Minds allows her to mentally track a willing collaborator, and Awakened Mind lets her to communicate telepathically with anyone. In a way, these abilities could be seen as OP in this type of campaign, as they can be used to sidestep quite a bit of legwork. but then again that can be said of almost any kind of magic. And as the character still has to do things to get results, getting herself deliberately into harm's way, I feel that this kind of character would give more to this kind of campaign rather than making things trivial. And the fact that one can create this kind of character straight out of the core set of rules -without any clunky multiclassing, to boot- is a good indicator of the versatility of the 5th edition D&D.

Besides, since Verity is a NPC, I can use her to deliver information for the PCs to act upon, and not to worry overtly how she could have acquired such information, as I have decent abilities to fall back on.

'Roguish with a dash of magic' is probably my most favourite character archetype, and I could see myself playing a character like Verity. And although she's built a bit like a one-trick pony, there's still breadth in her abilities to be of use in multiple situations.

Traveller Reskins: Small Craft

The various Small Crafts were never the intended focus for my Traveller Reskinning project; in fact, I originally considered doing the Ship's Boat, the Launch and a Fighter, and leave it at that. Well, one fighter turned into two designs, and when trying to figure the High Guard rules for the Small Crafts, the idea of a System Ferry slowly formed. It represents a type of craft that is used to transport passengers short distances in space, from Capital ships to Space Stations and other similar habitats - essentially a mobile airlock. It uses a 10 dTon hull, with minimal thrusters and has batteries instead of a reactor of any kind.

So with a 'bonus' ship, I thought I was ready to make a full PDF page. However, as I assembled the ships to the layout, I realized that there would be too much white space for my liking on the design. Something had to be done, and inspired by the Whartson Hall audio game recordings of Traveller at RPGMP3.com, I grabbed the Pinnace as a space filler.

And from there, things just went downhill. Somehow, I could not get the idea of the Modular Cutter out of my mind. It is not a glamorous ship, but the utility aspect of it started to haunt me, especially as there were no concrete examples of the various configurations in the rulebook. I wanted to see what an ATV compartment would look like, and that's when I knew I would get no peace of mind until I were done with the designs.

The rulebook mentions ATV, fuel and open modules, and I included the latter as the 'default' one; it is also quite simple to make one's own designs on that module. In addition to the already mentioned modules, I decided to include a basic Cargo Module, a Survey or Scout Module with living quarters for two, and a frontier Medical Facility, with an operating theater, sleeper pods and isolation wards.

In a way, the hardest one to make was the Fuel Module, due to it's simplicity. Just to make it more interesting, I had to add the service tunnel/crawlspace. Since it had Fuel Scoops, I also wanted to include fuel purifiers to the design, but as they were not mentioned in the rules I eventually left them out.

It also occurred to me that these modules could easily be used in creating a rudimentary planetary base or habitat. In that case, some sort of passenger module would be needed, and I was going to include one but just ran out of space. But Habitat Module, and some sort of connector modules might not be a bad idea...

Well, now I feel I have done everything I should with the Small Craft designs. Actually, the only one left out is the 95 dTon shuttle, and since that would eventually be just a enlarged version of the Pinnace, I think I'll give it a pass. Unless of course I get some horrible pangs of guilt for leaving things incomplete.

Oh, and as usual, the PDFs can be found from the Downloads (PDF) section.

D&D 5th Character Cards - Merilee, 3rd level Wizard

What any Watch Constabulary that wants to actually solve any crimes needs is Perky Forensic Examiner, and in D&D, that calls for a Wizard. Specifically, one from the School of Divination. Merilee is all about research and finding things out. She's a bit reluctant to go out on the field, but even there her Portent ability can be of significance.

Like the rest of the Watch members, Merilee was built with default ability scores. She was given the Sage/Librarian background, to really drown herself in digging out any and all esoteric tidbits from the Grand Library of Hieronymus. But although she can be a bit bookish, she's also quite outgoing, especially in familiar company.

Like Wilf, Merilee was raised in an orphanage. She does not quite know who her parents are, but she has made some educated guesses about them, based on her heritage, and has come to a conclusion that her mother was an elven debutante from one of the Nine Houses, and her father a young Neheniri merchant. She has a nice stipend from her parents to live by, enabling her to have her own house in town - which is in process of turning into a library, gradually. She has also noticed that her elven heritage alone cannot keep her all slender and willowy, but that she has to watch what she eats quite closely, despite her sweet tooth. And the fact that Shimmie seems to have an endless store of dates, spiced nuts and pastries with him and is eager to share does not help matters.

Of all the characters so far, Merilee was perhaps the easiest to stat. I think the default scores do give a good spread to play with, and yield to quite balanced characters stat-wise. I was at first a bit meh about the different traditions for wizard, and I still think that there maybe should be a bit more mechanical difference between them, but I have to say I like the roleplay potential for the Diviner's Portent ability quite a bit. No matter how you roll, those stored rolls can be used to good effect. Well, rolls of 10-11 may not be so useful, or at least can be circumstantial, but generally it is a nice little concept.

 

Traveller Reskins: 10 dTon Fighter

Count the 20 squares!

After the Scouts and Trader, I encountered a designer's block with the Far Trader design, and decided to try something smaller and simpler for a change. That proved to be a bad decision, as the Small Crafts are very vaguely defined in the Traveller main rulebook, and the plans still manage to contain all kind of contradictions. Of course, it could be asked that is there even a point in trying to come up with a top-down floorplan for a single-seat spacecraft such as the fighter, but that is another kettle of fish altogether.

Since there is an online version of Traveller SRD that includes the High Guard supplement, my next step was to go there and try to figure out whether the apparent contradictions could be solved using that resource. Instead, things just got muddier, and I realized that although I could use High Guard to craft the kind of ships I wanted, they would eventually end up resembling nothing like the ships in the main rulebook, stat-wise. For example, a 10 dTon ship with a power plant big enough to power a single laser could have a Thrust of 12, whereas in the main rulebook the Thrust of a fighter is only 6. But my plan was not to redesign the ships from the ground-up, just to provide upgraded visuals. So after some headscratching, I went back to the original designs, and decided just to approximate them, making sure that the things like Cargo space would match the tonnage given in the rulebook, and just roughly eyeball the rest.

In the end, I came up with two designs I liked, and with a different function to boot. The Aerospace Fighter is quite close in design to the the in the rulebook, and performs much the same role, having a streamlined hull and thus the ability to perform both planetary and system-wide missions. The Interceptor, on the other hand is a pure starfighter, with a distributed hull and not having even landing gear. What it does have, however, is an airlock, so that it can dock with other spacecraft easily, and of course the airlock can be used as an extra transport space.

D&D 5th Character Cards - Shimmie, 3rd level Fighter

Next up on the Oldgate Constabulary, I deemed that the PCs might need some extra muscle from time to time, and decided to give them a fighter companion. Here I had a bit of a problem with the ability scores, as I did not quite want to go with the 'tough, dumb brute' archetype, although Shimmie here clearly veers to that direction. But rather than being the drooling 'Yes, Boss' doorstop, Shimmie is streetwise rather than booksmart, and although he bores easily with theory and extensive planning, he can and does use tactics. I also see him actually reinforcing the stereotype intentionally, to gain edge against less savvy opponents. I am somewhat tempted to actually bump up the mental stats a bit, and lower the Dexterity score.

Shimmie was also created using the default ability scores. And since his backstory was inspired by the Midnight Oil song Jimmy Sharman's Boxers, I gave him a slightly modified  Gladiator background, although in a way a Folk Hero might have worked as well. And like with Wilf, for the ease of play I chose him the Champion fighter archetype, which gives mostly static bonuses.

Although Shimmie is rather easy-going and even cheerful in familiar company, he's quite reluctant to talk about his past before joining the Watch, for which he has quite respect for.

I'm also considering implementing a house rule that allows the final blow to render the target unconscious rather that dead to only apply to weapons causing bludgeoning damage. Any other weapon can be used in this way too, but they are less suited for it and thus attacks to knock out are done with disadvantage with these weapons.

Quick Vrusk sketch

While finally doing some other Travellers of the Frontier -stuff (more of that later), I needed to take a break, and felt like I needed some freeform after all that meticulous design work I had been doing. While going through my files for the spacecraft re-design project, I came across some of my early drafts for converting - or rather, re-imagining, the insectoid Vrusk species (as well as the rest of the major alien races) from TSR's Star Frontiers RPG to Mongoose Traveller, and felt like trying my hand in drawing one. I've previously done some miniature conversions of the Vrusk in 28mm scale, and the image is loosely based on those figures. I ran out of space on the sketchpad, and thus the abdomen/leg section is quite a bit contracted here, as the Vrusk should stand as tall as a human.

The draft seriously needs some expanding and editing, but I think I can get something out of this. And I think I might try the other species as well. Yazirian, most likely, as I have the the miniatures for those as well.

D&D 5th Character Cards - Wilf Mulberry, 3rd level Rogue

Even before I had the books, I had decided that I would try an urban campaign this time. And rather than having the PCs be some miscellaneous vagrants who just happen to stumble upon stuff, I wanted them to be a part of the establishment, in order to give them clear reasons to investigate the strange goings-on in the city. Thus was born Constabulary of Oldgate of the Highcliffe City Watch.

For the first character, I wanted a rogue who would work on the right side of the law. Initially I was on the fence whether Detective Wilf Mulberry was to be a Halfling or a Gnome, but then the tinkerer aspect of Rock Gnomes sealed the deal. And the +2 to intelligence was not to be scoffed at, either.

I gave Wilf a modified Acolyte background, being brought up by the church of Hieronymus, the God of Knowledge, with his sister, thus gaining proficiency in History and Insight. However, unlike his sister, Wilf never felt that his calling was to devote his whole life to the church, and although he still is quite reverent towards the ideals of his patron God, he wanted to find another way to utilize his skills and knowledge in the wider world.

Wilf is quite serious and a bit of an introvert, and tends to get carried away in finding mechanical solutions to problems both in his career and in his personal life, to the consternation of his colleagues and Captain Anneke in particular. He is easy to be underestimated or even ignored, a fact that he has used to his advantage in several occasions. He is usually moderately but neatly dressed, but rather than his own fastidiousness, this has to do with the diligence of his landlady, an elderly Coastlander widow who seems to have taken Wilf as her pet project.

Wilf was built using the default ability scores, as I wanted to see what kind of characters these would yield. He is also not very optimized, as I did not want NPCs that would easily outshine the PCs, and also ones that would be relatively easy to play, mechanically speaking. Had I made Wilf a PC, I think I would have gone the Arcane Trickster route rather than the Thief, and would probably have made him a Forest Gnome instead. But to round up the group of investigators that make up the Constabulary of Oldgate, he's a fine addition.

D&D 5th edition Character Cards

Ever since we pried open the 'Holmes' D&D box back in the day, and jotted down our very first RPG characters, DIY was the name of the game. I'm not sure if that edition even had any pre-printed character sheets, and if it did, photocopying them would not have been a walk in the park it is today. But we had pencils, and paper, and later whole notebooks to fill up with all the character details. So maybe it's a remnant from those days, or maybe it's just the way my brain functions, but even today if I need to really grasp how a RPG system - well, at least the character generation aspect of it - works, I do it best by designing a character sheet. For me, that is the way to see what is essential, and how the different parts mesh up with each other.

So, as my interest towards the 5th edition of D&D increased end eventually led me to purchase the rulebooks - first full core rules of any version of D&D I've had, by the way - the first thing I needed was some character sheets. At first I toyed with the idea of using some pre-made sheets, but then I remembered an idea I had had for Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, character cards for the NPCs where at the front side would be the name, picture, and similar information that the players could see, and at the other side there would be all the relevant game statistics for the GM. Of course, in WFRP the game mechanics are much more easily condensed than in D&D, but that just added one extra bit of challenge to the project. Of course I could not hope to cram everything in a space that would be slightly smaller than a regular postcard, but I figured that I could fit enough shorthand notes of the relevant information, and to find the rest of the stuff from the rules during the game.

The watercolour splash background for the character illustrations is a visual cue from the rulebooks which I liked; it also frees me from trying to come up with backgrounds for each image. In fact I made a couple of such shapes, and saved them as a mask layer in a PhotoShop document, so that I can easily give each splash a colour scheme that fits whatever character they are used for.

On the game mechanics side, I tried to keep the information simple and modular, so that a character would have only those weapons they are likely to use, spellcasting stats are of course class-dependant, and so on. I would of course need to have a separate sheet to keep track of current Hit Points, used HD, and spells and Spell Slots for casters, but other that that, I think most things are being covered.

One way to take this even further would be have the same style for the 'Name' side of cards, but have a different reverse side for detailed NPCs (antagonists or those likely to tag along), background NPCs (with motivations and RP cues), and monsters (mostly combat stats and tactics).

Wilf Mulberry - Digital colouring

After I was satisfied with the outlines, it was time to splash on some colour. In Photoshop, this usually involves building a whole bunch of masks to isolate different areas, and their numbers tend to go up as the drawing is in progress. In Procreate, this kind of process is fortunately not needed, as it is very simple to just turn an area you have just coloured into masked, isolated instance.

So instead of creating masks, I first made separate layers for each piece of clothing, skin, hair, etc. After everything was applied a flat colour base, I then alpha-locked each layer, essentially masking out everything else from that layer. In this way no matter what I would thereafter do with the colouring of that particular item, the results would be applied only to that predetermined area, and it made using texture bushes for example very neat and simple. And although I could not find a way to set a brush to Multiply or Screen as I used to in PhotoShop, it was just as easy to make new layer, make a selection based on the layer I wanted, and then to set the whole layer on Multiply, Overlay or whatever I wanted, and then merge that layer with the previous one. Working with layers instead of masks felt a bit weird at first, but pretty soon it became a natural way to work.

And just as with PhotoShop, I found that I tinkered way too much with minutea. I need to devise a simpler, more efficient way to apply shadows and highlights to the base colour, be done with it, and then texture it for my liking. But apart from that, I find Procreate a very user-friendly tool, and I especially like the fact that I can use it wherever I have iPad with me. For example, I dabbled with this image a bit while waiting for my wife in a car. I did not have my stylus with me, but colouring works quite well even with just your fingers, especially if the layers are properly alpha-locked beforehand. But as with any digital painting tool so far, the hardest thing for me is to realize when a piece is ready, when it is time to stop.

Horn-cry of Buckland T-shirt design

Occasionally, I get ideas for a t-shirt, but seldom do anything about them, and even more rarely have them finalized. This one breaks the mold, as I even got it printed. Twice, even, as the first shirt had a small print error on it, and I got the second, corrected one for free after reclamation. Nice service, and I fully intend to do more t-shirts by this company, when I get around to design them.

The phrase "Awake! Fear, Fire, Foes! Awake!" is of course from the chapter The Scouring of the Shire from the Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien, where it is used to transliterate a horn-call in times of trouble. I had had the text design ready for a while in InDesign, and initially my intention was to make the shirt just by using the ring design. It did not feel complete, though, and eventually I realized what was lacking. Still, it took a while until I finally managed to muster myself to draw the horn design. My first draft was a bit more heraldric in design, but it drifted towards the more naturalistic one during the sketching process. And yes, I realize that the name of the Shire province, Buckland, most likely refers to the bucks of the deer variety. However as in the Finnish translation the region is called 'Pukinmaa', the land of the ram, I instinctively went for the more domesticated species. In either case, the shape of the horn itself is pure fantasy. The drawing itself is traditional black ink on paper, although for the design I had to invert it for it to work as a negative. The colours are those traditionally favoured by Hobbits, and also inspired by the fact that my wife has a Riverdance t-shirt that utilized this colour scheme.

So, I now have a t-shirt that say I like Lord of the Rings. But most importantly, it also says that I Liked Lord of the Rings Way Before It Was Cool and if You Have Only Seen The Movies You Won't Most Likely Even Get The Reference. Which, of course, is the most important thing ;-p

Digital Inks - Wilf Mulberry, take two

After the - let’s say less than stellar - first outing with the Jot Touch, I’ve had more experience with the stylus, and have grown more accustomed to it’s qualities. There’s still a bit disconnect with how I would like it to perform, and what it actually does, but I’ve grown a lot more confident with it, and the variance of style compared to traditional ink and paper does not bother me that much anymore. One thing I found that was quite a good exercise for both fiddling with the brush styles and the flow of the strokes was to try some calligraphy with the stylus. These exercises helped to drive home the differences and how to alleviate them.

But although the process - and the result - was smoother than before, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. I still had to do some lines several times over, although a big reason for this was that the sketch was less clear than I could hoped for. Also I still haven’t had to nerve to tear off the screen protector, partially because it might not be the cause of some of the issues I’m having, and for other uses the iPad is utilized, I think the protector is a good idea. Although it is starting to peel off at the edges a bit already, so I guess I’m just waiting for an organic moment to remove the protector film and then to see if it has any effect.

So, here’s the second attempt at Wilf Mulberry. Besides the difference in style, I also this time tried to account for the fact that I intend to colour the drawing at a later date, and thus the detailing and texturing was left to minimum. In a way, I kind of like the rougher, less polished first attempt, and that sort of style might work pretty well for some purely black&white drawings, perhaps with some rougher set of brushes as well. But for as a base for the coloured artwork, the more polished style works better, I think.