I think I’ve mentioned before my love of RPG games like D&D and Risus. This is a character I recently designed; a Dwarven bounty hunter known simply as Wolf the Bounty Hunter (yes, I did that on purpose). He’s a walking Swiss Army knife: in addition to his custom-built, spring-loaded, prosthetic, chained-mace arm, he carries daggers, boleadora (a 3-ball bolas), caltrops, handcuffs, a light shield, flash bombs, and many more devices to aid in the capture of fugitives.

I sketched him out in pencil in a couple hours, then I used India Ink pens to ink the sketch for another two hours. The coloring was done in Photoshop; probably another four hours for that part, what with the shading and all that. I’m pretty happy with this piece, I have to say. And I’ve gotten a lot of positive reactions from it!

I needed to design a T-shirt for my architectural firm’s corporate scavenger hunt team-building activity, so I listed some architectural terms and started adding tough-sounding words. We ended up picking Capital Punishers, “capital” being the topmost portion of a column (see the bottom part of the skull?), and “punishers” seemed to fit well, plus it gave me the idea to trace the skull in the first place. I used the actual Punisher skull logo and some column capital imagery, overlaid everything and got to sketching.

Adobe Illustrator was a big help, too: bringing in the scanned sketch, I used the Live Trace option to clean it up and tweak some things, then added the text. I even used some of the elements from the sketch to help roughen up the text appearance. I’m pretty happy with the results, and it won first place in the T-shirt contest. I would’ve liked to add some color, give it a heavy border, too. Maybe next time.

Warrior. Hero. Legend. (Maybe)

This is my concept for the main character, whose reputation precedes him (and may in fact be false). He’s certainly brash, and not exactly cowardly, but I wouldn’t call him the sharpest blade in the sheath. He also has an enormous bar tab at the local tavern (possibly elsewhere, too!), so greed for gold definitely motivates him.

Calm as can be, even in battle.

This is a monk type character for the aforementioned web comic. Someone the party meets on their way, perhaps. Quiet, simple, mysterious. Oh, and super powerful.

Good with a knife. Better with two.

This is a character concept for a new webcomic I’m developing. He’s a typical rogue-like character, in a typical fantasy world. The format of the comic itself is where some innovation will be employed!

This is a style I’ve been working on that I want to apply to a few comic strip ideas I’ve had in the near future! I hope to post many more “completed” drawings like this one over the coming weeks. I recently purchased some India ink pens, which are fantastic! I need more colors, though: only got the 3 primary and 3 secondary colors. But anyway, I’m glad to be drawing by hand again, rather than with a Wacom. Much as I like them, there’s something about truly hand-drawn artwork that’s just… right.

You can enter and sort just about any data you want, visualized in a myriad of ways. This example shows the number of Titanic survivors, which can be sorted by gender, class, age, etc. Very interesting and nerdy stuff.

The magic wand tool, something I’ve used millions of times (not hyperbole) wouldn’t work properly.

I used it for an identical task yesterday for at least two or three hours. It was a simple click-and-fill situation, but it kept finding selection edges well beyond the borders of my neat little sections. This drove me nuts: I triple-checked every setting I could find, even in places that shouldn’t have anything to do with this tool. I looked at Channels, Paths, other tool settings. I couldn’t figure it out. And you know what it was?

The $@%# Eyedropper tool. I had changed its settings earlier to get a broader color sample, and apparently that thing directly affects how the Magic Wand finds selection areas! So annoying.

So, be careful of your various tool settings, you never know what’s going to affect something else!