Out Of My Mind

I have re-joined the ranks of the proletariat. That means I got a regular job. Monday through Friday, I am now a graphic artist at the Peninsula Daily News, our local newspaper. For those of you concerned about Susan’s “End of the World” post, this is what she was talking about. Her husband won’t be cooking and cleaning all the time anymore.

Me? I’m just happy to have a regular paycheck. I still have my freelance graphic art business and am working out of the home: that won’t change. But from 7 to 4, I am owned by the PDN.

Next alien from Dan Repperger’s Epoch of Rysos © universe.

This is a Tembian, an air-breathing aquatic alien race.

The Tembian spends most of its time floating on the surface, being able to fill the septa of it’s shell structures with air or water, like ballast tanks. It can move on land but only slowly and with great effort.

It filters its food from the water with the flagella structures on the underside. These also provide minor locomotive power. The forward tentacles are arranged so that four “thumbs” surround a single “finger”. Each tentacle can be used with precision against the central finger, but is fairly clumsy when used in conjunction with any other thumb.

There is no internal skeletal structure, though there is a cartilaginous system. The Tembian language is mostly whistles, grunts and clicks, vocalized through the dorsal blowhole (not shown). The Tembian does not have a conventional mouth.

The next in this series should be the Ipp, a symbiotic sapient race that feeds by cleaning the Tembian’s feeding flagella of a barnacle-like parasite. Dan gave me very little art direction on this one, only stressing that he wanted it to be “unusual”.

Here’s a not-quite-new piece. I did this before Halloween, but by agreement, have refrained from posting it until the beginning of the year, since the client had a number of events planned for it. The client is Paradigm Concepts, the creators of Arcanis, and of course Witch Hunter, in which players take on the personae of 17th-century vanquishers of supernatural evil. This is for an annual event called Wicked Harvest, which as I understand it, is some sort of tournament event. This piece went through about half a dozen iterations on the pumpkin head, from a traditional jack-o-lantern face, to a flaming interior, to a more human-like expression, to the current green glow.

This is another alien concept for Dan Repperger’s Epoch of Rysos role-playing game and fiction setting. This alien is called a Mordeth.

At the start of the project, I was given a description: Continue reading Featured Art, The Mordeth

I picked up a demo copy of a really sweet video desktop capture program. To test it out, I used it while painting my latest commission. A lot of people ask me: “How do you paint on the computer?” Hopefully this answers a lot of questions.

The subject is an Asta, a member of an alien race from the Epoch of Rysos, ©Daniel Repperger.
I’ve linked to the first video in the series (there are 12, plus a conclusion). The whole series can be found here.

… Or any of the major family holidays.

This post is for suggestions on how to reduce the stress that many of us feel around this time of year, and perhaps re-capture an appreciation of the things that are good about it. I’m using Christmas in my examples, but feel free to apply this to other holidays which cause you or someone you know stress. If you have more solutions, please post them as comments.

1) Christmas is not a calendar date.
We were being really dragged down by the amount of traveling we were doing on what is ostensibly a day of celebration and enjoyment. One of the best solutions we have found is to make the day AFTER Christmas (Boxing Day) the day for visiting family. We don’t have to rush out the door, the child[ren] get to play with their toys or just play and be with immediate family.
We did not opt for the day before, because our daughter needs her sleep, which is hard enough on Christmas Eve without adding in hours in the car and getting excited by playing with cousins all day.

2) Spread out the presents
This is for families with children.
Some families have a rule about presents only being opened on Christmas morning, others allow one present to be opened on CHristmas Eve. My suggestion is to spread the presents out, particularly if you have lots of adult relatives mailing in kids’ gifts. If you are a parent, or around small children, you have probably witnessed Present Shock, the sensory overload that comes from opening too many presents too fast. Tags get mixed up, the child only remembers the last present opened, and then is faced with too many choices about what to do next. For a week before and a week after (or some other time period) open a present a day. Make a little ritual of it, doing it at the same time of day if possible.
The child gets to really appreciate the gift, and if you have them write a thank you card the same day, that task is spread out as well, and the child does not have to be reminded who gave them what.
Save the big family or Santa present(s) for Christmas morning (you know, the bicycle or video game system or what have you), as well as the stocking. But that board game from Uncle Max might actually be played and a cogent thank you note written if that is the only present for the day. Even the smallest present gets appreciated.

3) Stockings
This may not be for everyone, but it helped in our house growing up. Stockings are kid-distractors for parents who want to sleep late or cook breakfast before the morning rituals. A stocking is a “gift from Santa” whether your family embraces the tradition as “real” or not. Parents do not need to be present. Put in toys, puzzles, dexterity games, Rubik’s cubes, etc. in there to give you time to have a leisurely morning.

4) Commercialization
Do your shopping early, throughout the year if possible, or on-line even. Unless going to the mall and listening to Muzak Christmas carols and seeing Christmas displays is what you need to get your Christmas Spirit moving.
Mail out Seasonal cards. If you do this early enough, and regularly, far-flung relatives will realize that you are not getting them an expensive gift, and they don’t need to get you one. Christmas presents are for kids, really. Adults can buy the things they want. Closer family members can get simple gifts. Communicate this honestly and early and you might be able to reduce a sense of dreaded obligation. Hopefully, you don’t have a Christmas Zealot in your family to deal with, but coordinated action from the rest of the family might be able to reduce even this.

5) Married couples: Compromise
Be understanding that your spouse is different from you inside and probably has a different list of what they need to make the holiday enjoyable. Give them space if they need it, or follow them on some of their Christmas rituals. Give and take, and be honest with each other. Don’t make ultimatums or use guilt as a weapon. If you have a strong marriage, you probably already know this one, however.

6) Reducing the Gimme instinct in children
Organize some sort of community-benefiting activity. Helping with a charity drive, donating old toys and books, helping at church, anything that isn’t about getting. Make it just as normal, regular and important as the rest of the Christmas traditions. With any luck, regular exposure to this sort of attitude will instill good habits in later life and build a new young person with a good civic attitude. At the very least, you’ll be helping some folks who don’t have all the opportunities for happiness that you do.

Here’s this year’s Halloween treat. This is my reading of Little Orphant Annie, by James Whitcomb Riley.

Little Orphant Annie

If you missed last year’s offering, here is The Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe

The Raven

These maps were part of a much larger series done for Hero Games’ publication, Pulp Hero. Part of the background for the sourcebook was an overview of the world of the 1930’s. This was one of the heyday decades for pulp action, and of course, the stomping ground of that modern pulp icon, Indiana Jones.

Pulp World 1935

In order to give these maps flavor, I decided to go with a period look. I wanted the maps to be interesting props, evoking the feeling of the setting as well as being an informative guide.

Continue reading Featured Map: The Pulp World, 1935 and German Expansion, 1930-1939

Here’s a commission I recently finished. This is the logo for a science fiction setting, Epoch of Rysos.
The client had specified a “clean future” sort of a look, not the lived-in and tarnished Star Wars or Alien style world. He also specified a squarish design rather than a rectangular one, for ease of use in future design products. I’m really happy with the way this came out.

This was designed in Illustrator to get the vector shapes. The individual layers were imported into Photoshop, where I worked layer effect magic to turn this:

into this:

There really isn’t much more to the Photoshop file than the black and white image you see in the first shot. Each design element is on a separate layer. Each layer has a series of effects that control things like beveling, shiny-ness, color and gradient, texture, drop shadows and so forth. Once the base design is achieved, the majority of time is spent in tweaking all of these individual layers and their effects to achieve just the look you want. This same design could have been made to look as if chiseled on stone or carved from polished gemstones without touching the base art, but only manipulating the layer effects.

First off, for those of you into the Wargame/Role-Playing Game, it’s not that Warhammer. This was a logo for a Mixed Martial Arts studio that I did through Empty Room Studios. Superficially, it does have some similarities to the game property. They both have a larger-than-life sense of design, with sensuous exaggerated musculature and rounded, yet chunky, massive form. The instructions from the customer were “an image of a viking/warrior/beastman smashing a warhammer (or probably a sledge hammer) into a stone version of their company name WarHammer MMA“.

My first three sketches were as follows: Continue reading Featured Art: Warhammer