[Art & Warcraft Stuff] October 2023

[jordangreywolf]

Things were looking up for me in October, until reality slugged me in the face. I got back in contact with the RPG gang, and we started making plans for getting back together to game again on every other Saturday (or thereabouts). Digital_Rampage was a big proponent for Dungeon Crawl Classics, a bit of a throwback "old-school" game purporting to be like old original Basic D&D, with the novelty of having super-randomized starting characters, and having players take their randomly-generated 0-level peasants through a "funnel adventure" to see who survives to become a 1st-level adventurer.

I also played around a lot more with AI-generated art, mostly for the novelty, but also because it gave me something to share with Koogrr, as I tried to coax portraits of his various RP characters out of the keyword prompts. Almost all his characters are some strange sort of anthropomorphic animal/creature character, so getting the details just right are a challenge - and sometimes I've just had to use AI art as a stepping-stone, ultimately finishing the work by Photoshoppery to collage bits and pieces together.

However ... none of that AI stuff here. It gets into dull grey areas where I can hardly call the result "mine," even if I did put some actual work into the patching and cleanup.


Brewfest Lebkuchen
Some "lebkuchen" cake-cookies with a crackly frosted layer (that I tried to depict, as the thin frosting very easily formed web-works of fault-lines with the cooling of the cookies and any slight pressure). Drawn for a recipe article. Brewfest largely took place in September, but also crossed over into early October. Gwendel and I had our own IRL attempts to celebrate "Oktoberfest" by going to a couple of local German restaurants, and also to an "Oktoberfest" celebration at a nearby park. My mom and dad really loved the "Oktoberfest" eatery at EPCOT, and this was the sort of thing I could partake in and have an "excuse" to call them up to tell them how it went, share pictures, etc.


The Worgen Greeter
Another character portrait, this one of a worgen "greeter" (bouncer) at a posh restaurant purportedly in Stormwind City (but really using a location in Dalaran as the proxy).



The Hat Makes the Dracthyr
With the moratorium on being able to "report" on adventures of Gwendel's RP group for the fictitious fantasy newspaper, I lost a lot of my rationale for drawing doodles of the PCs on their adventures. I mean, I COULD have kept right on drawing them, but there were plenty of other things to spend my time on. Whenever Gwendel decided to show up for RP, I'd tag along as well, but "bardic reporting" was no longer on the agenda -- and frankly many times I would just show up with an alt, as the "crazy gnoll chef" instead, since he seemed to fit in better. (Sometimes the PC group could get a bit arbitrary in their application of violence, and taking questionable moral stances, and it was just more convenient to play an idiot along for the ride.)

Anyway, I don't even remember what brought this up, but I think either I or someone else lamented about how dracthyr can't wear hats in-game, and this led to a doodle-joke like this, imagining what that might look like if it were possible.

I think Gwendel hasn't shown up for RP with the group since October, but keeps insisting she's not quitting Warcraft, and will be back on any day now. (As of this writing in 2024, I don't think she's signed into the game even once this year. I've only signed in to check her mail so that mailed items don't get returned or lost, etc., and to run some of her characters through things like the Darkmoon Faire to get those little skill point boosts and such. I'm thinking it's time to stop the auto-renew on the WoW subscription.)


The Restaurant Greeter
This was a more challenging attempt at a portrait -- I tried to be more refined and a little less sketchy.

A member of the staff of a posh restaurant in the Mage's District stands at the door with some menus at the ready.

This picture took a few revisions, because while I initially based it off of the character's in-game appearance (with some liberties on hair style, based on some references I was given), I got the body structure wrong. As the player described it, "In Warcraft, all the human men are built like Arnold Schwarzenegger, while all the women are built like Nancy Reagan." Okay, so maybe that's a little extreme, but the character is /supposed/ to be a tough, fight-y type. My first attempt didn't even get close to that.

I ended up reworking the figure to change the size of her head in proportion to the body (trying to push in the direction of super-heroic proportions without going overboard, I hope), and reworking the shoulders and size of ribcage to make her seem less petite, though the face is still probably too "soft." I was working from a composite of references for the hair, face, etc., based on the in-game model and desired hair style, and the result looks rather "over-worked" compared to my quick-sketches (and to the level of detail elsewhere in the picture) -- particularly after all the revisions -- but past a certain point, for purposes of getting the illustration off my list and on to the next one, I had to call it "done." I'll try to learn from it and do better next time I try something like this.

The backdrop is based on a screenshot from A Hero's Welcome in the Silver Enclave in Dalaran (Northrend or Broken Isles version, I don't know which), proxying for a "posh" Mage District establishment.



Dead Forest Cake
Midway through October, All Hallow's Eve was definitely on the horizon. For a recipe article, I was tasked with trying to give a recipe for totally-not-German black forest cake a Hallow's End spin. Thus -- Dead Forest Cake. Those are supposed to be white-chocolate "trees" around the edges.



Count Batcula Doll
"Sqveak-sqveak, sqveak-sqveak!" (Translation: "Blah-blah, blah-blah!") Color sketch of a plush doll of "Count Batcula" at a Stormwind Market stall, just in time for Hallow's End.

Back before my house-flood disaster (up until circa July 2022) I was regularly reporting on the "Stormwind Market," and doing doodles based on some of the vendors and booths there, but when I lost ability to play WoW for a while (hence being able to show up to "report" on the event), someone else stepped in to cover the beat. She'd illustrate her articles with screenshots, usually taken out at a great distance such that individual characters were blurry vaguely humanoid and ultimately unidentifiable blobs, but every now and again there would be a request for some cute "plushy" toy to use as an illustration -- because it seems that just about everyone in the Market sells "plushies." (Also, they're easy to draw quickly, with very little in the way of advance notice.)

The wallpaper was a pattern I scribbled and turned into a Photoshop bucket-fill pattern for an illusion of detail in the background.


Jack-o'-Lantern Squash
Another recipe article, another Hallow's Eve reference.





Supa-Yum! Fruit Drink Logo
I had the family room mostly conquered by this point, and as I was looking forward to inviting friends over, I wanted to finally put up some of the wall decorations that I'd salvaged. The fireplace wall was semi-restored ... sort of. In the course of getting the house re-roofed and the back extension of the house fixed up (it was a do-it-yourselfer MESS that was long overdue for a complete fix-up), I was basically told that hardly anything was up to code. They simply COULD NOT leave my chimney intact -- it was a fire hazard, and if I'd actually tried to use it, I would likely burn my house down. Also, the wall around the chimney was decorated with planks of cedar wood nailed over (and through) tile, which was glued to drywall attached to wooden supports (and no insulation), and when they started disassembling the paneling to do a "flood cut" of the wall to repair the water damage, it was a real mess. A lot of the wood came apart and couldn't be reused. Also, there was no attempt to document which piece went where, so putting everything BACK in place was nigh-impossible. New cedar planks had to be bought, and they didn't really match the old ones, so the whole thing, once reassembled, had a really scrappy/scavenger look. Also, somehow random pieces of wood had bits of paint on them.

In other words ... hey, totally apropos for Fallout!

I figured I'd put a bunch of tin signs and such up on the wall, and some Fallout memorabilia on the fireplace mantle, and fix it up a bit. I was thinking things were shaping up nicely, and I was looking forward to sharing pictures with my dad about all the progress I'd made on turning the house into something liveable. I figured the retro vibe to the "Fallout" decor might amuse him as well.

So -- among my projects were these giant "bottlecap" wall hangings.

At Dollar Tree, I found some metal "bottlecap" wall-hanging pieces in the craft section, and I got the idea to make some Fallout-themed wall decorations.

I just needed to make a design that I can print off and cut out to fit within a 5.5" diameter circle, then stick onto the surface with some spray adhesive (I use Tacky Glue spray adhesive). I've also got some small metal bottlecap shapes (1" diameter circle) that I plan to affix smaller versions of the designs to, in order to make some Fallout-themed gaming tokens/Bennies and/or fridge magnets (but as of this writing, I haven't done much with them).

Nuka-Cola, Vim!, and Sunset Sarsaparilla were obvious choices for faux drink brands in the Fallout setting, and I could find logos for them fairly easily. I tried looking for something more obscure, and found "Supa Yum!" on the wiki. It only "exists" in-game insofar as the hydra in-game model incorporates a bottle labeled "Supa Yum! FRUIT DRINK" -- though evidence of the brand can't be found in any other context. The logo itself was pretty lackluster, and not terribly fitting with what I think of as the Fallout aesthetic, with a typeface that looked akin to Comic Sans ... so while I thought to try making a Supa Yum! logo to print off, I decided to redesign it in hopes of making it feel more "retro-futuristic" rather than just dialing it in with unadorned Comic Sans text in a circle.

The main logo typeface is from Fontdiner -- a source of some of my favorite typefaces for making custom billboards, handouts, etc., for tabletop gaming in a Fallout-inspired setting. The "sparkles" are just created with the straight-edge lasso tool in Photoshop, then using the shape selector and filling in some circles at a few of the tips for a "mid-century atomic sparkle" look. I deliberately went for three colors only (not counting the outer circle cutting guide, which shouldn't be visible once I'm done): white for the background, then blue and red-orange, but with spacing so that the colors don't touch each other (i.e., to have allowance so they don't overlap in the case of misalignment, a la old container printing).

For the actual version I printed, I added a registered trademark symbol, but I figured if I shared a version with that online, that could be problematic (since this is, to my knowledge, NOT an actual registered trademark).



Up 'n' Atom
A fictitious retro-futuristic logo for an imaginary apple-cider-based carbonated beverage marketed as a "sparkling" beverage for breakfast. (Granted, something orange-based probably could have marketed better for that.) I'm heavily inspired by Fallout's retro-futurism, and envisioned this as a logo I could use for an imaginary drink brand / corporation for an alt-history RPG setting -- whether for custom Bennies (Savage Worlds) or other game tokens, for item cards, or for tabletop terrain elements such as miniature billboards, posters, etc.

One wall-hanging I picked up at a thrift store was one that seemed to be advertising some generic source of "homegrown apple cider," with an image of apples, but no brand name given. It's a nice enough design, suitably retro-looking, and I ended up hanging it on the wall as-is, but it inspired me to imagine ... what COULD be a Fallout-ish brand name for apple cider? "Up 'n' Atom" was a result of that. Another brand name I came up with was "Atom's Apple," and I've considered making some cut-out logo letters for that to affix on top of the "apple cider" sign, to give it a brand. I'm just not sure if I'd RUIN it in the process, so I've procrastinated on that for a long while now.

The retro typeface used above is called "Mrs Sheppards," available from Sudtipos Studios.



Sunset Sarsaparilla Bottlecap Wall Hanging
For this, I put together an image in Photoshop heavily based upon the in-game Sunset Sarsaparilla logo, but I modified it to be more circular in design (rather than the original "sunset" dome shape) to better fit the "bottlecap" shape. I couldn't find any images of in-game Sunset Sarsaparilla bottlecaps and I'm not entirely sure they even exist. (I mean, yes, there are the "star" caps, but I only ever remember seeing those star-side up?) In any case, I was able to make my own. I decided to take a picture of the final product, actually printed and pasted to the "bottlecap" wall-hanging piece.

Unfortunately, this is right where my month -- or my year, or my decade, for that matter -- took a massive downturn. I called up my dad -- or, rather, got my mom on the phone. I wanted to check on a few things -- wanted to share about progress on the house, send him some photos the cleaned-up room and wall hangings, talk about some car-trouble stuff, etc. -- but also I wanted to check with my mom about some ideas for a birthday card drawing design for my niece. My mom talked with me, and typically my dad would cut in at some point during such a call, but he didn't. My mom started to mention how my dad had been feeling so tired lately, and then a few other medical details that were immediately very alarming and filled me with dread, stuff that would be "Why isn't he in a hospital RIGHT NOW?" bad. I won't go into details here.

Anyway, she went over to check on him, while I was still on the phone.

That's when everything turned really dark. I've already posted about that day earlier. I'm still not over that. I'm not sure I ever will be.



Haylee's Birthday Card 2023
A depiction of the birthday girl at work. I forced myself to finish this. It wouldn't be fair to miss my niece's birthday. The celebration was, of course, not really much of one. Honestly, I think it's fair to say that my two nieces had been much closer to my mom and dad than I had been for the past two decades or so, despite my attempts to keep in touch.

I flew off to my mom's and dad's place ASAP. I said my goodbyes. My sister was there, too, and my "crazy uncle" who hit the road in his van as soon as he got the news. I took my laptop and my work with me, and there was a crazy lot of stuff to juggle while I was there.


Candy Corn Punch
Somehow I also got a doodle done for the weekly recipe article. "Candy corn punch" in a faux "witch's elixir" article, to fit into the Hallow's End theme.


I flew back home for Halloween. I didn't do any celebrating.

Comments

[tuftears]

*hugs*

Beautiful art as always, the food looks delicious!