[Art & Warcraft Stuff) December Doodles - End of 2022

[jordangreywolf]

In December of 2022, I was still stuck at the hotel while my house was in limbo. The good news, however, was that finally, FINALLY, it looked like work could start on my house, and insurance would cover ... part of it. Art-wise, I was still contributing to an online "newspaper" through Discord, but my game computer (Gwendel's hand-me-down) was still unusable while at the hotel, because it didn't have wi-fi. In theory, I could have gone out and bought a wi-fi adapter, but ... on the one hand, I didn't want to spend the extra money on something that might in theory be redundant "any day now," and on the other, I just honestly didn't have the time to get roped into spending lots of time online in Warcraft quite yet. It was just as well I had something of a "vacation" from it.

For illustrations to go along with the "articles" about the RP adventures, I was relying on accounts from the players, which would often be considerably after the fact of when the session actually happened. Not that it terribly mattered for the "newspaper," just as long as we were providing some material every once in a while.


The Deconstructor Cleaning His Room
In a recent RP session some adventurers visiting Ulduar, faced with the latest iteration in the XT line of Deconstructors, managed to re-code it to "clean its room" (the scrapyard), which kept it busy and out of trouble for a while.


The Great Moo- er, GNOOT?!
A dwarven & gnomish gathering called the "Moot" happens once every couple of months or so for a light cross-server RP event. Ostensibly it's for the thanes to meet and discuss business, but mostly it's an excuse for a bunch of people to crowd around, pretend to drink virtual beer, and partake in various "sports" that are just glorified coin-flip exercises (ram jousting, gryphon ring toss, and the ever-present drinking contest). This weekend, they decided to focus on gnomish contributions and are calling it the "Gnoot" instead -- mostly because it's silly, I'm sure.

I still have trouble finding the right balance for "gnome" proportions.



Soup's On in Stormwind
A Gilnean worgen working at the Stormwind Soup Kitchen (that's the Gilneas heritage set under that silly apron), ladling bowls of soup for refugees of various conflicts in Azeroth.

The apron and pose are inspired by a vintage Campbell's Soup advertisement.



The Not-So-Abominable Greench Doll
Quick doodle I was asked to draw of a plush "Greench" doll for a Stormwind market booth, in time for Feast of Winter's Veil shoppers.




The Holomancer
A half-gnome/half-goblin "holomancer" (mage/tinker with a specialty in techno-magical illusions) creates a representation of a design from some blueprints.

Another guild was built around the idea of a mostly gnomish crew of a giant land-crawling super-fortress-vehicle-thingy called the ATLUS. In the interests of drumming up some more material for the "newspaper," I participated in a "tour" of the ATLUS through their RP server, with different channels set up to represent the different "rooms" of the thing. (It was a curious setup, as I'd have to scroll to the top to see the room description and image to represent each room, and then there would be the captured chat of everything that had HAPPENED in that room, before getting down to "the present." Since it was organized by location and not by chronology, I ended up getting fragmented bits and pieces of the relationships between the characters while "exploring" the place. It felt almost like going through one of those ancient point-and-click adventure exploration games where you get pieces of the 'story" via QuickTime video snippets representing ghostly hauntings, etc., like 13th Guest or Morpheus.)



A Happy T-Rex
I struggle to come up with new birthday card designs. My niece likes T-rexes, so I was inspired to draw a very happy T-rex -- one with mecha-arms! Now he can take over the worrrrrrrld ! Mwahahahahaha! Or reach into the back of the fridge, which is just as good.



The A.T.L.U.S.
Greebles. So ... many ... greebles. There were a couple of "portraits" of the ATLUS available on the RP server, done by AI art (MidJourney, I'm guessing), without much in the way of consistency (because ... it's AI art). I tried drawing a scene of the machine, focusing on part of it that seemed to be a relatively consistent feature across the different depictions, drawing inspiration from the drawings, but not being entirely slavishly devoted to recreating them. I mean, if their own "canon" pictures don't agree with each other, I guess I shouldn't tie myself up in knots either. I added in a few gnomish flying craft to use the landing deck.



Springpop Soda Company
Portrait of one of Gwendel's "gnome" friends online, with her own "business." Products were represented with TRP3 Extended items.



Jani Bells!
One person's trash is another lizard's holiday gift! A "Child of Jani" sings "Jani Bells" in the spirit of the giving and accumulation of massive amounts of TRASH! Yay!



Pondering New Inventions
A portrait of another member of the ATLUS crew, for the ongoing sequential tour. (This was slow enough and detailed enough that I broke up the "tour" into separate articles, in weekly installments, and I needed some sort of illustration for each one.)



Mulling Over a Beaker of Coffee
The ATLUS's accountant (and part-time alchemist) goes through some papers.



Cultivating Herbs
An herbalist gnome working in a hydroponics lab with a mixture of gnomish technology and nature magic.



Azerothian Gingerbread Cookies
A few gingerbread cookies decorated with frosting in various ways to represent different Azeroth-appropriate subjects. On the left, a Winter's Veil tree; at top, a Stormwind ginger-guard; on right, "Gingerstrasza."




Sunrise Over Valdrakken
With the new Dragonflight expansion, lots of events were taking place in Valdrakken, so I needed at least a backdrop/placeholder image for articles that lacked a ready illustration to set the scene.



Gninja!
As part of the continuing tour, we went through the ATLUS's training area, including a sort of "danger room" with automatons for fighting. Go gninja, go gninja, go!



Winter in Duskwood
Once again, I tried doing a familiar location, but with a visible season change. I imagined frosted spiderwebs making for quite the festive winter-wonderland look.



Winter's Veil Eve in Gilneas City
It's a neat zone. It's too bad there's nothing really to DO there (and no flight masters or innkeepers to make it easy to go there) beyond it being a starting zone for Worgen ... but at least you CAN visit it, unlike Kezan.




Cryosanthia and Lily
I decided to work in a bit of a "cameo" for a wintry market scene. Here's an imagined dracthyr version of Koogrr's dragon character Cryosanthia, with her adopted daughter Lily (normally a kobold child, but here a little drakonid). Apparently they're doing some winter shopping in Stormwind City, near the harbor.




Merry Tyrmas!
Assorted images from a silly light RP celebration of "Tyrmas." Most of the gifts exchanged were either themed after Keeper Tyr, the Titans in general, or the dragonflights (who were really good buddies with Tyr back when there was that incident with Galakrond in the day). As part of the celebrations, there was the decorating of the Hammer of the Silver Hand (draped with silver tinsel, and strings of decorations in the colors of the five major dragonflights), a play recounting the tale of the battle against Galakrond (complete with costumes and puppets -- a huge Alexstrasza costume piece pictured in the background), and exchange of gifts and snacks (assorted examples being in the foreground).

Not pictured: a popular gift for the young'uns would be mittens ... and one of each pair is silver.




Night Knight
A night elf warrior (or a KNIGHT elf?) decked out in heavy armor. Since it's the season of Winter's Veil, I'd throw in a gag about "Silent Knight," but I'm not sure if following up with "Holy Knight" would fit in this instance.



Misty Streets of Gilneas
A moody backdrop/location sketch.



A Gentleman of Gilneas
(Building upon the Gilneas City backdrop I put up above.) A portrait of a gentleman of the reconquered and (partially) restored Gilneas City. It's still a pretty rough place, after the Cataclysm, the Worgen curse, the fall of the Great Wall of Greymane, the Forsaken Incursion, that whole business with the Shadowlands unleashing undead hordes upon Azeroth, etc., but, hey, it's got that creepy perpetually-overcast, fog-shrouded, fantasy-pseudo-Victorian charm to it (plus the occasional werewolf).



The Peacock Knight, Revisited
This is a holiday image I drew last year for Koogrr's Pathfinder character, Sister Paenitia Snapdragon (and her battle-peacock, Ramirez). I decided to revisit it to do some touch-up work, and add in something of a background.



The Bulwark Knight
This knight is so huge, he's got GARGOYLES perched on his shoulder guards. This was part of a rush request for several portraits for an end-of-year project for the newspaper.



The Dreaded Gus-Duck
This was an encounter from a weird RP adventure -- a dire duck called "The Gus-Duck." Why was it called that? Near as I can tell, purely meta in-joke reasons. (Apparently it was born from some sort of silly meta-discussion poking fun at someone whose handle was "Agastos." I think. I wasn't part of it, but I just picked up a few bits.)

By this point, I at least had Gwendel's PC running, and I was able to borrow it to join in on a few light RP sessions when it wasn't otherwise being used. I still tried to keep my involvement to a minimum, though.



Extreme Dragon Racing
What was supposed to be a dragonrider racing scenario somehow (but really not that surprisingly) turned into a pitched battle with Primalists and a psychotic storm-infused proto-drake. Here, a mecha-gnome mechano-mage prepares to toss a "frost nova" grenade into the heart of the storm in hopes of hitting the proto-drake generating it. Her bronze drake flying partner won a "gold star" earlier for the training class, and proudly displays it on her horn.




Library of the Lost - 2022
My "last unicorn of the year" doodle for 2022. It's not really finished, as far as I'm concerned, as I'd like to fill in a background scene. Considering how far I am into 2023 without having revisited it at all, I don't know how likely that is to happen. I tried to draw this in a pseudo-Tenniel style, with the conceit that maybe I could actually use this for some Wonderland No More project ... but that's fallen by the wayside as well. (I hope to change that, but I've been hoping that for several months now. I just need to NOT BE DOING OTHER THINGS, I guess.)

Comments

[tuftears]

The soup kitchen worgen is *the cutest!*

Great stuff as always. You really nailed the coloring on those gingerbread cookies!

Dragonflight is possibly my favorite expansion, dragonflying is such an amazing mechanic, it's what epic flight should've been back in the days, except they probably didn't have the in-game support for people zooming at ludicrous speeds.

[jordangreywolf]

Re: Dragonflight - Recently I was having a discussion with Koogrr about horses and motorcycles in games like Fallout 4, etc. Purportedly, horses in Skyrim were very underwhelming, and they took deliberate measures to attempt to "deemphasize" horses to some extent, because of this. Namely, they had to rein back (ha!) how fast horses could go, because otherwise they would mess with the "sandbox" zone-loading mechanics -- i.e., if you went too fast, you'd get into a zone before everything had fully loaded, and this would lead not only to diminishing graphical experience, but logical oddities. So, even more so, they decided against trying to add a Highwayman (car) or motorcycles to Fallout 4. They DID add the option of breezing across the landscape in a vertibird, but that only worked because when the vertibird is airborne, you're only experiencing a very "low-res" version of the world, with critical elements loaded in, and a lot of the game logic (such as detecting player collisions with the environment) can be completely ignored (though this sometimes leads to silliness such as a vertibird clipping through a building at odd points >_<; ).

I think there might have been a similar problem with Warcraft -- with dynamic loading of content in new areas, you might fly faster than the game can keep up with updating your presence in a new zone.

And ... yeah, as frustrating as the dragon-riding is in some respects, I find it a more *fantastical* way of handling flight, rather than treating absolutely everything (mecha, dragon, gryphon, gyrocopter) as if you'd enabled game-cheat levitation in Minecraft. I just wish...

* I could bring in some of my "regular world" flying mounts into the Dragonflight zones, for vanity purposes. I'm fine with it suddenly acting like dragonriding. I've got a few dragons, after all. It would be neat if druid flight form could have dragonflight dynamics.

* I could fly my dragonflight mount in non-dragonflight zones. I'm fine with it suddenly reverting to regular flight mode if that's absolutely necessary.

I guess they've got their reasons.

Anyway, one thing I really grasp from Dragonflight is that it feels like they've done a much better job at making engaging "world events" to take part in. It feels a lot easier to catch some activity going on, and jump in with whoever happens to be there, without having to sign up with a raid, etc., and then feeling awful when I'm a subpar member of the group and I get booted out. >_<; I've just been kind of thrown off by how briefly it seems that each event has its "heyday" before a new patch comes out, new event, etc., and then those activities are virtually impossible to complete anymore because nobody is around. Especially Forbidden Reach -- we were there, I ran around following the crowd to take on all the bosses, and then ... new patch! Everybody's gone to check out the NEW stuff, and hardly anybody comes BACK.

Also, the Time Rift stuff is kind of silly, but I actually had fun with stuff like Azmerloth. XD

[tuftears]

I think 10.1.7 will actually allow us to use dragonflying in regular Azeroth! Looking forward to it.

I agree that's a problem with the world events. The events are relevant for... like two weeks, then the fun wears out. They patch it by having the weekly ask people to do a given event, once, but that's not really a great or long-lasting solution since the weekly reward is itself not very rewarding if you're capped on all reps.

I'd definitely enjoy being able to dragonfly in flight form...

[jordangreywolf]

It's been kind of weird to acquire new flying mounts in the Dragon Isles ... that I can't actually fly with there. It would have been nice if gryphons, etc., might at least *glide*. (I.e., if you forget and mount up with a non-Dragon-Isles flying mount because you hit the wrong action button, and then plunge off a precipice, you don't have a Wile E. Coyote "Ut ohhhhhh!" moment but can at least land safely. XD Not that this has NECESSARILY ever happened to me. >_> <_< )

[tuftears]

It's a good idea to have a stockpile of goblin gliders in your inventory for exactly such meowments. ^.^

But yeah, that would be nice!

[jordangreywolf]

Can goblin gliders be used mid-fall? O_O If so, that would be useful, yes! (As it is, I break out a parasol any time I'm harvesting herbs at a high elevation, just in case I wasn't paying proper attention and managed to grab one of those that causes a wind gust.)

[tuftears]

Yep, they can be used mid-fall! UNLIKE many toys that give you temporary gliding.

[jordangreywolf]

:scrambles to get some goblin gliders - and put an action hotkey on the bar:

Thanks for the tip! XD

[tuftears]

Sure thing. ^.^