Infernal War Machine Tokens Remastered: Devil's Ride

It's hard to believe it's been almost 5 years since I was playing Descent Into Avernus with a D&D group I'm not even in contact with anymore. I created these Infernal War Machine tokens as a way to make the machines easier to identify, fitted to a grid so that the player characters can man the helm and various weapons the machine has.

Doodles

Sometimes when I doodle something, a specific drawing just stands out for some reason. Maybe it's got a sort of perfect symmetry to it, or a beauty in a collection of its curved lines, or a humanoid figure looks particularly realistic in its form, or maybe it's just a well-detailed ink drawing with no mistakes in it. When that happens, I cut out the drawing and put it in an envelope called the "Envelope of Fame."

After many years, I accumulated quite a few of these precious drawings, and I realized how much I wanted to showcase them. At first I organized them into compilation PSDs, but just looking at a big mass wasn't a good way to appreciate the individual doodles. So I made this video. It was hard to come up with what music to play while the doodles were scrolling, but in the end I decided on the soundtrack from Goofy's Extremely Goofy Skateboarding (2001), which reminds me of the most carefree years of my life; and "Knight Gold" from Heroes of Might and Magic II Gold (1998), which I would like performed at my funeral, if at all possible.

I proudly present this compilation as a deep look into my artistic heart over the past 15 or so years. Enjoy.

Inktober 2020 Entries!

Inktober was a ton of fun, even though I ended up getting behind and only finishing today. I'm definitely going to make this a yearly tradition. This month gave me the chance to get out of my comfort zone, learn some figure drawing, draw several things I've never drawn before in my life, and practice techniques like varying line width. These all look like perfect candidates for drawings that I can color digitally later, so stay tuned for that, maybe as a month project in six months or something.

Without further ado, here are all the drawings from Inktober 2020 along with their prompts! Also, you can mouse over each drawing to get some commentary on them.

4 Random Mini-Projects from the Past (and a Surge of Unexpected Nostalgic Gratitude)

What a rough year. So little free time, so much stress about finances, and so much hinging on my success in this coding certification. Luckily, the course is going good for the most part (I seem to learn by osmosis—even on days I don't pay attention I seem to soak in the knowledge and remember it later), we have WIC, and I just started a D&D group with my wife, my brother, and his wife. A weekly group! I couldn't be happier. Having something like that to look forward to each Wednesday night is a real buzz. Maybe I'll summarize their adventures on the blog every few weeks. It could be a fun thing to showcase, since I'm going to be doing a lot of worldbuilding for it.

Anyway, today I want to just dig up a few old projects from my past to showcase them for you. I found them while looking through old tablet boxes at my parents' house, and I gotta tell ya, those blasts from the past feel real nice. Honestly, one of the things that just keeps me going in life is seeing all the stuff I came up with as a kid. It gives me hope of having continual creativity in years to come.

Pumpkin Sculpture 2015

Here's my pumpkin for this year! It is a lot harder to sculpt than it looks. I even got legit ceramic tools this year, and it was still pretty hard to get the look I wanted. The pumpkin's moisture was a really big obstacle in the process. Oh, well. Still looks pretty neat. And the best part is, it won the "Scariest" award at my work pumpkin contest!

Sculpture?

I don't know why, but until this year I've never tried to actually "sculpt" a pumpkin before. Unlike most art projects, I never really took pride in carving a pumpkin. I would just cut a scary face or an outline of Trogdor the Burninator in it and call it good for the year. But I've been missing out!

This year I tried actually making a pumpkin sculpture, varying thickness to make different brightness levels in the pumpkin when it's lit. It was surprisingly soft to carve, even though all I had was a cook's knife, a teaspoon, and a cutting saw from a pumpkin carving kit. Next year I'll hopefully have access to better tools so I can more easily transmit my imagination to the "canvas," as it were.

Not my best work, but it is my first work! I'm looking forward to a new tradition!