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
I updated my site today with a new(ish) acrylic painting. I always felt a little bad for the cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey. I mean, sure he ate a bunch of Odysseus’ friends, but they were trespassing. And then Odysseus had to go and poke out his eye while he was asleep. He only had one! Years later, in the Legend of Zelda and other video games, one-eyed boss creatures continue to suffer abuse at the hands of plucky young adventurers. Sigh…
On a similar theme, I did the following sketch… I guess because of a combination of the cyclops painting and the fact that I recently re-read The Hobbit.
Enjoying: The Once and Future King (still)
Anticipating: Portal
Studying: Yoshitaka Amano
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
I recently went to the Florence Griswold Museum here in Connecticut. Currently, they have an exhibit of Norman Rockwell and an assortment of contemporary American illustrators, and an exhibit of illustrator David Macaulay. The overarching theme of the two exhibits seemed to be health and the human body.
Norman Rockwell, of course, is an American legend, and most of the pictures at the show were instantly recognizable. The most notable was, perhaps, Doctor and Boy looking at Thermometer, characteristic of Rockwell for its gentle prodding at a flawed but mostly innocent American everyman – in this case, a would-be truant schoolboy. Rockwell has been derided and criticized for his rose-colored view of American life, but luckily his work is popular independent of this criticism. I think that in the time period in which Rockwell lived, given all that was happening in the world, taking a gloomy, sardonic view of the world was understandable, but terribly easy. Rockwell’s pictures, in contrast, keep their chins up, with a nostalgia for an America that perhaps never was, but for which we can nonetheless still hope. If Post-modern artists painted, hung, and critiqued their work under the dark cloud of World War II, Rockwell did so at its silver lining. Anyways, the exhibit was about health advertisements, not war. Consider that a side-rant.
In the contemporary exhibit, I got to see a really cool painting by Peter DeSeve. I can’t find the actual painting on the internet to link to it, but if you haven’t seen DeSeve’s website you should check it out.
And lastly I saw David Macaulay’s exhibit. I was excited about seeing it because he was one of my teachers back at RISD, but I didn’t realize until getting there that the work being displayed was for The Way We Work, an upcoming book which gives an illustrated journey through the human body – explaining the body’s basic components from cells, to organs, to organ systems. It was really cool to look from the Norman Rockwell exhibit into the next room and instantly recognize the work. David does all his thinking on tracing paper (or at least of his work that I’ve seen,) working up from past drawings, adding in torn bits from other drawings, and laying diagrams over existing pages. For the semester that I took his class (called “Explain It”), we worked and thought using this process as a tool, which was sort of new to me at the time but seemed natural. Looking into his part of the exhibit, the room looked like a giant version of one of our critiques, with tracing paper pinned up everywhere with delicate, detailed drawings that suggested the interior of the body as a vast architecture of interrelating systems. Some of the drawings were even descendants of ideas he’d shown us in class when talking about his project. All in all, the exhibit was a testament to a prodigious amount of work, and it’s worth going and taking a look at it.
Enjoying: The Once and Future King by T.H. White
Anticipating: a lot of work tomorrow
Studying: still Franklin Booth
when whippoorwills call and evening is nigh
I inked these two just recently, so I thought I’d post them. I’ll be painting over these in acrylics. I’m almost finished painting one of their brothers, but I unfortunately forgot to scan it before I started doing so. If I really feel like having an ink version of it, I have the drawing saved on my computer, so I may go back to it yet just for the sake of completeness. Lately I’ve been looking at the work of Franklin Booth and marveling over his excellent penwork, so you might see me liberally borrowing some of his techniques in the weeks to come, just to try some new things.
Enjoying: Foyle’s War
Anticipating: The Spirit!
Studying: Franklin Booth
bright blue his jacket was and his boots were yellow
Hey all! My name’s Stephen Weed, and I’m a freelance illustrator. I’ll be using this blog to upload sketches, ideas, and new work in the near future, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I’ll be working on finishing up my new website, www.sweedart.com.
Thanks for dropping by!
Enjoying: The Engineer
Anticipating: D&D 4e
Studying: XHTML
the fire of September that made us mellow
Sweedart 
