If you don’t get this, don’t worry. It’s either because you don’t play Dungeons and Dragons or because you haven’t played long enough to abuse the rules in an attempt to gain imaginary power at the expense of self-respect. Or because you don’t know what an iPod is, in which case, like, wow, where have you been?
This is an observation I’ve made, not just in my group of nerd friends, but amongst nerds at large.
The nerd friend depicted on the right was born on this day. It occurs to me that although I got the date right, the age eludes me. However old you are, Happy Birthday Jane. You should go check out some of her work.
Over on the D&D message boards, there’s somewhat of a to-do about the new revealed player race, Dragonborn. People were puzzling about how a female Dragonborn could look both reptilian and feminine. I decided to try my hand at it to see where it went. This is what I came up with:
with male counterpart for comparison:
Oops, there went November without a single post. I guess once New Year’s comes around I have a good resolution to set for myself: one post a month at least. So, what have I been up to in the meantime?
Well, most importantly, I’ve done a commission for Mongoose Publishing for their roleplaying game, RuneQuest – a pretty exciting moment for me given my love of RPGs. I drew ten monsters for the interior of their upcoming release, Monsters II. All I know is that any assignment where I get to draw a dragon is awesome. You can check out those pictures on my portfolio page.
Around Halloween (yeah I know, I should really have updated), I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to get into the holiday spirit and ended up wanting to do some illustrations for it. Below are some of the sketches I did for that.
Is it just me or is the first part of Dracula a lot more compelling than the second? I’m referring to the portion of the novel where it’s just Jon Harker matching wits with the Count in Transylvania. The cat and mouse games in the beginning of the book are, to me, the most interesting part. While the character of Van Helsing brings some interest to the rest of the book, Stoker starts getting downright sentimental once the story moves to London and the titular character moves into the background. It is, of course, a convention of Stoker’s time, but the cross-admiration that goes on between the main characters got a little trite for me, as did the strained diary format. Lucy Westenra’s last entry for instance, was something to the effect of “Dear diary, I am bleeding to death, thought you might want to know…” A little corny, Bram. The narrative is much more suspenseful when it’s Jon Harker balancing on the edge of a knife while playing the fool for the perfidious Count, cut off from Western society. I’m not saying there weren’t cool parts in the second half of the book, just that the first half was a lot cooler.
Enjoying: The Singing Detective
Anticipating: RuneQuest Monsters II 
Studying: GIMP and how to make it work more like PS
shadows and dust
