The final batch of illos from the noir contract. So that is it for art-sharing from this contract! I don't think I missed posting any of them. Also, I received word earlier today that my cover is slated to grace Fight On! issue #9. I can't wait, and I'll finally be able to share it with you guys! Bonus.

As usual, click below to jump right to the images, or jump directly to my deviantArt gallery.

The Syndicate

The Legion (or the alternate)

The Limelight

I don't like the Legion as much as the other two: it just turned out too rough. I don't know if I was having a bad week or what, but things just didn't seem to click with it. The Syndicate and the Limelight, though? Definitely grooving on both.

Another batch of stuff finished quite some time back: three more illos from the noir contract. As usual, click below to jump right to the images, or jump directly to my deviantArt gallery.

The Fed

The University

The Inquisition

I'm fairly impressed with all three of these. Favorite from this batch is the Inquisition piece, but not by much. Really grooving on all of them.

These were finished quite some time back and I'm putting them up now. Here's three more of the illos from the contract. As usual, click below to jump right to the images, or jump directly to my deviantArt gallery.

The Institute

The Forge

The Press

I'm OK with these. I really like the Institute piece. I think the shadows on the Forge piece are screwed up, and the posing on the Press still looks funky to me (I've fixed it twice), but I'm not messing with either any longer.

I've updated The Adventurers image over on my dA gallery. I didn't like the way the legs and the shadows looked, so I fixed them, and added some thicker mist. An alternate mist-less version is also there, just to show off detail.

Two more pieces from the contract as well, and six more on the way as soon as I get them uploaded. And three pieces left to finish.

The Corporations

The Vigilantes

Clicky for bigger at dA.
Comments welcome.

Must be Art Night!

Here's another of the completed pieces for the noir RPG. Just one, even though I have a backlog of illos to show off (there are six other final pieces you haven't seen yet), but I'm waiting on a couple of those as I'm not sure they're finished or I'm not quite happy with them and I there are tiny tweaks I want to make to fix them.

As usual, click on the image to jump right to a bigger version of the image, or go to my deviantArt gallery.


The Adventurers

Today started with me not being able to stand for longer than five minutes without my legs shaking uncontrollably. But it turned into a much better day. I'm still run-down, but feeling much more like myself than any day prior. Which means: I can do 15-minutes of activity without feeling like I need to lie down for an hour.

I even finished up one of the illustrations today! Yay! Work on them had languished given the hospital stay and the post-hospital "feeling like crap", but Duncan was thankfully very understanding about the situation.

On that note, here's an update: three more of the illos from the contract. As usual, click below to jump right to the images, or jump directly to my deviantArt gallery.

The Kingdom

The Business

The Order

Not sure how much I like the window frames in the Business piece. I'm thinking now I should have tried to do something more 30's-style and old New York architecture.

The more women I read on-line, the more glad I am I found Jenny. Way down at the bottom: "There is very little as creepy as spending four pages talking about how to draw fetishistically oversexualized women and then signing off with 'Now if you wouldn't mind, my creation and I would like a little privacy.'"

I really fucking HATE those "men who talk about/refer to sex and/or sexy women and/or liking women are creepy" women, whom I have sadly met more than my share of on-line peripherally or in discussions (for example in this puerile nonsense, especially the "ew! ew!" part). Fucking soccer-moms (CONTEXTUAL IRONY!).

Because "creepy"?! That's AWESOME! Excuse me while I draw some sexy women and then go spank the monkey to it like a healthy, normal, adult, human male. As opposed to, say, a robot. Or a wooden chair.

If I were with a woman who thought the above was "creepy", rather than recognizing it's a perfectly normal thing for either gender (and a pretty good self-deprecating joke about that normal thing), we would have been gladly divorced a long time ago. BLEH. And it would have been good riddance to rubbish! So, thank you, Jenny, for not being some sexually repressed "feminist" Puritan!

PS: why do all the hypersexualized "masculine" men in the first linked post look...queer? (And I don't mean as in "odd".) I know it's not the case, but I can't help but wonder if it's Freudian feminine undergarment, perhaps?

A while back, I promised I would put some of these up when I had the chance, so I took some time off from the onerous task of re-doing the work on the illustrations I'd lost to do just that.

The illustrations are up on my dA account for public consumption, and you can either click here to jump to my gallery or use the thumbnails below to jump to each image directly.

The Beats

The Underground

The House of Decadence

Note about critiques for these: as these are the for-print finals, and as I'm pretty aware of the issues with them, you can if you'd like, but I'd prefer not in this case. Of these, I'm the happiest with the Beats, and the least happy with the Underground. I have some mixed feelings on the House of Decadence.

Last night, my machine spontaneously rebooted itself and ate all the illustration work I had done since the weekend. I have backups, thankfully, but I've lost everything since the weekend, and now I find I am having trouble picking myself back up and working on the illustrations again. I look at them and think "DAMNIT. I already DID this." I hate redoing work I've already done.

I have six of the twenty commissions done.

I would have two more of the commissions done, but I've had to go back to the drawing board on two of them, and am waiting on instructions on one of them. There's a possibility a third piece may need to be redone, or rather a new one along the same lines done in addition to it. I have also added two additional pieces to the commission work.

As well, December and early January were a bust for work, as either myself or Duncan were busy or out of town, so there was limited/no communication during that period. So I'm moving more slowly than I would like, but much of that is due to fixing details and such on the submitted pieces and waiting to hear back on submitted finals...hrm...

Honestly, with the issues of the December holidays, I've only been working at this for slightly over a month now that I go and look at the actual time frame. That's not actually bad, given the amount of revision and the two pieces that need to be completely redone.

I don't know why, but the last few days I have been suffering intermittent bouts of severe dizziness. I'm off the meds the doctors tried because they weren't doing anything good for me (big surprise--hah, typical) and have been for a week, so I don't think it is an issue of withdrawal.

The dizziness is not fun, though; makes it very tough to do anything and especially get any work done. Worse, it suddenly spikes and dips, so I'll be sitting here feeling just a little woozy, and then suddenly, BAM! I'll nearly fall over, as though someone just tweaked all the cilia of my inner ear.

Seriously, WTF?!

I have, however, also been having the most freakingly in-cred-ible dreams lately.

On the artwork front, I've finished two more illos for Duncan. I've been holding off on putting any of them up in my gallery because we're/I'm still tweaking a couple of them, so the current finals for a couple earlier attempts may not be the finals at all (though they aren't far from it).

I'm also concerned I've lost one of the finals, as the low-res final I sent to Duncan does not seem to have a corresponding high-res copy on my drive. PANIC! CHEW NAILS! GIANT WATERING EYES OF VULNERABILITY! Eh. I can recreate the final easily enough from the earlier versions and guidance from the low-res copy, but WTF?! Clearly I had it at one point, and then it...walked off my hard drive?...hid in some electro-magnetic crevice?..or what?

Finally, I found this amusing: I Googled into a copy of Dragon #10 (circa 1977) and therein immediately saw an article entitled D&D Options: Orgies, Inc., which I discovered was all about how to get characters to want to part with their vast adventuring wealth. Ok. The title is shock-value, right?

Nuh! There is an option that reads as follows:

5) Orgies. Fighting Men (excluding Rangers and Paladins), Bards, Thieves, and all Chaotics (excluding Monks). Lusty indulgence in wine, women, and song. Maximum expenditure is 500 GP per level per night (250 GP if recuperating and under 50%). A player may orgy continuously as many days as he has constitution points, but then must rest for as many days as he orgied. (For effects on Psionic Powers, see Appendix II.)

Which is followed at the end of the article by said appendix, the idea of which just makes me giggle:

APPENDIX II:EFFECTS OF AN ORGY ON PSIONIC POWERS

Each 20 GP spent on an orgy will reduce psionic point level by one. Every 100 GP spent will have a 10% cumulative change of eliminating one special ability secretly determined by the referee. The psionic points are regenerated normally, while a special ability is returned with each 100 psionic points regained (or all lost points are re-generated, whichever is least).

EXAMPLE: A 4th Level could spend 2000 GP in one day, gaining 500 experience points and losing 100 psi points and two special abilities. For convenience, start regeneration the next day at 6:00 AM. Assuming only one day was spent orgying, the character must spend the next day resting quietly. With a regeneration rate of 12/hour, the character will be completely recovered psionically in just under nine hours, though his hangover won’t disappear completely until the next morning.

Seriously, right? Plus there's a big, raunchy, 70's high-school notebook-style cartoon illustration of orcs and elves and whatnot going at it in a giant fit of debauchery, including showcasing bared elf boobies.

I daresay you wouldn't find any of that in today's weeniefamily-oriented corporate-gaming culture terrified of offending anyone in the least with even the very idea of imaginary people doing things with their naughty bits.

(But somehow, in comparison, talk of chopping things into bloody bits with sharp objects is A-OK!? One would think sex would be more family-friendly, since sex creates families and violence destroys them...oh you crazy witch-burning Puritans, still influencing our modern culture with your wacky social mores from beyond the grave! Get outta here! No, seriously. Get out.)

How I pine for the lost innocence of yester-year's gamer geek, who was free to look at badly drawn elf boobies and create rules detailing the effects of debauchery on character stats and have both published in an official game magazine.

Oh, for the days of yore when we actually wrote serious, complex, convoluted rules for every possible event that could ever, no matter how remotely plausible or uncommon in play, take place in a game and put them into a monthly subscription format that people paid real money to await like Christmas-in-their-mailbox and read!

I've been letting NaNo slide for the last week, mainly because I've had other things going on that have demanded the immediate attention of my free time: specifically the new illustration contract I'm working on.

Games I Want That I Simply Can't Afford:
Dead Space
Gears of War 2
Left 4 Dead
Fable II

Also, I am saddened that the new PC games I would like to play are not playable on my non-dual/quadcore antiquated top-of-the-line system a couple years ago.

More art & illustration! The third piece for the surreal-noir illustration contract, placed again on my dA account for public consumption. I absolutely love this one. Took me weeks to finish, but oh boy!

You can either click here to jump to my gallery or use the thumbnail below to jump directly to the piece.


The Enemy

A significant number of additional pieces may be on the way. Stay tuned!

Well, that was another not fun experience.

I lost the last couple days of detail work on the last image for Duncan when my D:\ drive turned itself off again in the middle of a file operation

The device disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

and the file simply disappeared. Poof. Gone.

Windows - Delayed Write Failed : Windows was unable to save all the data for the file. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.

I spent today running file recovery software, to no avail. It was just gone. Thankfully, I keep sequential file backups, so I can go back to a point not too long ago, but it does mean I have to redo the detail work that was lost. Le sigh.

And I was almost done with it, too!

But I took a couple hours off, letting the computer do its thing, and went down to play a couple games of V:tES. Lost the first game, and with another five minutes, I would have had the table in the second, but game time ran out. Both were good games, the latter especially.

I'm glad I went, though. I almost didn't. It was good to get away from the problem for a while and play. Took my mind off the situation, and kept me from becoming ridiculously despondent over the loss. If I'd stayed at home instead, I'd be in a mood.

I've been trying to finish the last image for Duncan, and what I have so far is sweeeet.

Unfortunately, I've been stymied by computer problems the last couple days, starting with slowed running and lengthy pauses between action and result, a drive that disappeared and did not reappear until reboot (I almost shat, as it was the drive with all my projects stored on it), and culminating with the machine freezing before the boot even gets to checking the memory.

(Reminder-to-self: do a new back-up. Check various on-line backup services.)

Today was also a bust work-wise as I sat and ran troubleshooting scans that ate up the entire freaking day (at least it gave me time to organize my other drive, watch a movie, catch up on some reading, and volunteer at the local DFL office). I'm going to bed now.

Tangentially: I've managed to (almost) fill up a 500Gig drive with stuff. Wow.

More art & illustration things. The second piece for the current surreal-noir illustration contract, placed again on my dA account for public consumption.

You can either click here to jump to my gallery or use the thumbnail below to jump directly to the piece. One more piece is on the way.


Cult of the Gun

Taking a break from screaming at the world with some updates on various art & illustration things. First, minor note: I've finally updated the graphics on WHS with a set I did up a fair bit ago to have a little more color and pop. Ostentatious!

Second, as mentioned prior, I've started a new illustration contract. Just three pieces for right now, for a currently unnamed surreal-noir RPG being written by Duncan Wright. Sadly, no site for it yet, but I'll make sure to put a note up once there is. I've placed the first of the illustrations on my dA account for public consumption.

You can either click here to jump to my gallery or use the thumbnail below to jump directly to the piece. Two more pieces are on the way.


G-man Noir

Also, on a completely unrelated tangent: I look weird with short hair. I don't recognize myself.

Oy. What a week. First the fridge-and-freezer started acting up: the ice-cube maker stopped making ice. Then the whole thing broke down completely: it wasn't getting cold and the fridge part ended up room temperature. We lost around $50 worth of food for the month because it thawed before we noticed and could do anything about it. Worse, it was about $150 for the repair.

Luckily, we were able to salvage some of what we had in there thanks to the small standing freezer we own, which a friend and I had to haul from the old place using my car, in which the freezer did not fit -- so we lashed it to the trunk with coax cable.

Yesterday, we bring the cat in to be declawed before bringing her to the new place, but the vet calls and tells us the pre-op bloodwork shows she has diabetes, which is also why she's been peeing everywhere: can't help it, bladder isn't working right. And she has an infection because of the diabetes and the uncontrollable bladder.

Good chance this is all fixable with insulin and antibiotics and regular vet appointments. But it's another $200 this month. Not including the eventual declawing, which will be another $150.

Topping it all, my daughter's guinea pig died. It wasn't eating, and we figured that was due the stress of the move (new place, anxiety, etc), but then we noticed night before last it had developed eye gunk and labored breathing. All of it added up to classic upper respiratory infection. I'd hoped to get her to the vet in the morning for antibiotics, but she didn't make it that long.

My daughter was crushed: bawled her eyes out the rest of the day.
And Jen made me tell her.

Still haven't finished moving everything since dad didn't help on Monday like he was supposed to. Now, supposed to go today with one of our friends to get the last few big items out, as he's bringing his truck over. My back is killing me already.

I'm also terribly behind on my latest illustration contract: three noir-ish supernatural horror pieces.

On the bright side, dad brought some new stuff for the house the other day -- a nice pair of end tables, some tools for my workshop downstairs, a whole new bed for my oldest daughter rather than just a mattress, and a much needed bookshelf -- and we're making steady progress with unpacking when shit isn't raining from the heavens.

And my daughter's lazy eye is better. It's possible she may not need glasses in six months if it keeps improving. Though I realize now I forgot to give her the eye-drops this morning. Arg.

Son is on a new med regimen that will hopefully help him get his remaining (and worsening) behavioral issues under control. Had to pick him up from school once this week because the teachers couldn't handle his outbursts and disruptions. So the doc dropped one med that was likely causing his increased mood swings, agitation, and hyperactivity. Hopefully, this will stop him from driving everyone nuts.

Got to play Cthulhu for a couple hours last night. But it comprised too much wandering around with nothing happening. Remind me to write about the importance of scene structure in an investigative horror game some time, and how it should not be similar to "carefully mapping corridors and kicking in doors", like D&D or video games.

I had a moment so I changed out the existing versions of the Anima and Expexiant with the updated versions for the dA gallery, but they won't look much different to anyone (I added some necessary shading and texture. Nothing major or highly noticeable).

However, as I mentioned wanting to do a while back, I did come up with a couple possible layouts for WHS. You can see the two mock-ups created for public discussion/feedback here and here.

Final update on the Neoplastic contract for Dread. As I would have needed another week to hit the deadline (the week I lost to my damn computer crash), Rafael decided to cut the final three illos, for a total of nine. Again, the illustrations are on my dA account for public consumption, and you can either click here to jump to my gallery or use the thumbnails below to jump to each image directly.

Druthua

Keradhon

Aztec Warriors

I hated the Druthua. The concept never seemed to work right no matter how I approached it and I didn't have enough time to throw some background elements in; it just didn't turn out the way I wanted, so I'm not happy with it at all. But I lurved the Aztec Warriors and the Keradhon. Both went down smooth and were fun to do and turned into efforts I'm proud of.

I also tweaked the Anima and the Expexiant based on Guy's feedback. I'll eventually put the fixed versions up, and I think they look better now. Thanks, Guy!