[Artwork & Stuff] April 2024

[jordangreywolf]

Epic Tel'Abim Banana Bread
I was asked to make some banana bread to look really EPIC, based on a meme. This was my attempt.



Khaz Modan Bierock
It has no bier, and it is not a rock, but it's a bierock! Anyway, just a doodle I drew for another recipe article in an imaginary newspaper.



Lemon Poppy Seed Pound Cake
Lemon poppy-seed pound cake from a Bundt pan (or whatever the fantasy-world equivalent is), against a nondescript landscape background. (I knew I needed SOMETHING in the background, but had no idea what would make sense, and didn't feel like drawing another vaguely-defined kitchen backdrop, so I just started scribbling in something landscape-y, starting with the sky, then layering forward.)

Here, I ran into a little bit of a mess, because the article-writer put in the request for the illustration, then bailed on the article. Apparently she'd been using AI for writing the articles (I kind of suspected this, with some of the really weird repetition and awkward details such as a tendency to repeat the ENTIRE NAME of the food item for each and every instance in the article), but I guess the stress to get things done was still too much. Or something. So, totally wasted effort. Grr.



Kaftar Spider Kebabs
As a bit of silliness, I tried sharing a "recipe" for kaldorei spider kebabs, basically imagining that sufficiently large spiders might have leg meat that would be something like crab meat once boiled, and then combining that with my own experiences doing kebabs on the grill. From the POV of a gnoll chef trying to share the recipe, though, a lot of the "steps" just involved remembering not to eat all the meat before finishing the kebabs, not to eat the skewers, not to stab anyone with the skewers, not to get poisoned in the process of acquiring giant spider legs, and so forth (and not in that order).

Alas, this was not as amusing to anyone else (or at least not to the editor) as it was to me, and while they ran with an edited version of the article as a filler (since the weekly recipe-writer was still not turning things in, yet hadn't officially quit), the artwork "couldn't" be used because apparently the idea of a gnoll character is offensive to the RP community or something. There are plenty of people in their community pretending to be bug-people or bird-people or any number of other not-actually-playable-in-WoW races, but for some reason gnolls are just "gno way!"



Spicy Kaldorei Rice Cakes
We got another interim recipe-writer (there was no WAY the crazy gnoll chef was going to become a regular, if, canon-wise, they wouldn't allow that he should even EXIST), and I did a doodle for it. I used the interior of a hut in Val'sharah as a model for the kaldorei kitchen backdrop.



Yet Another Pink-Haired Gnome
You can't have too many neon-pink-haired gnomes!



The Highwayman Rolls Out
I'm still running Dungeon Crawl Classics (grr - maybe I'll rant on that later) but in the background I've been toying with ideas for a Fallout-themed campaign. Mostly I've just been painting and kitbashing random things as it strikes me, or as I get a 3D-print to work with. Here's an off-brand model that suspiciously resembles the Highwayman from Fallout 2. It kind of bugged me that it's an ELECTRIC car that runs off of energy cells, but it's got an engine and a shaker scoop that would suggest a COMBUSTION engine ... so when painting it, I added some electric blue glow to suggest some sort of hand-wavy retrotech at play here.



Mutant Firefighters
A few weird minis from a board game expansion for "The Others" ("Beta Team") painted up as mutant firefighters, along with a broken "Cars" fire truck toy that I picked up at the thrift store. It was around this time that I decided to poll the players about ideas for what they might be interested in for a Fallout-themed campaign, should I be allowed to do that next. My initial idea was to have a "road trip" adventure along a ruined "Superhighway 66," but the one player who was the biggest Fallout fan was more interested in some sort of base-building type campaign (like Pathfinder's "Kingmaker" series). I started to reconsider the setting and just how I'd be handling the campaign. How to make it more "sandboxy"? Well, for one thing, I need to be a little more generic with the figures and terrain bits, rather than investing too much in a "star" location, because the PCs might simply NEVER GO THERE.

Along those lines, I was thinking, hey, rather than having supermutants as a tired old trope, maybe we should have plain ol' "mutants" of the non-super type pop up here and there. I'd probably have a lot more freedom to dig into my collection of oddball minis to find something to fit, rather than restricting myself to overtly Fallout-focused minis. Since I had these odd figures lying about (got them on clearance, super-cheap), I thought I'd try painting them up for such a purpose. (Maybe there's a town full of mutants. Maybe there are some mutated descendants of denizens of an old town who dutifully take up the uniforms of the roles of their ancestors, even though the actual DUTIES they perform might be unrecognizable to the original purpose. Firemen who start fires rather than put them out--hey, that's already been done in Fahrenheit 451. Oh well. XD )