Hello all (even if it is just a number of crickets chirping).

Since I have spent a lot of time this week working on getting the blog up and running I have only had my free Monday to work on Lords of Illic. I started strong this morning making some tests to find the glitches with the turn restart function, the button for which is disabled in the current build up on itch. I made quite a bit of headway when it came around to 11:50ish, a bit too early to heat up lunch. So I decided to see if I could find a quick issue to finish off before lunch. I had been thinking about adding a shopkeeper for the shop. 

A few years ago I designed a character called Lucia for when my brother took over game mastering for a campaign called the Crystal Compass. Lucia was... an ill-fated character. While I may have been lauded for my game mastery skills, my roleplaying skills as a cute female character where... a bit lackluster to be charitable. Rather than being a loveable character somehow she ended up as a spite-filled character inspired fear in the other PCs. At least she had a pretty cool build - she was a rogue who used magic through wands and magic items. Either way when I was looking through my art a couple of months ago I thought she would look good as a shopkeeper. So it would be quick to add her to the game right?

Turns out that through making characters for the game I had improved to the point where she required quite a bit of rework. Then I looked into my folder for art work related to dungeon and dragons games, organised it and well... Since I am partially through fixing the turn reset function no build today. Still I think she looks pretty good in the shop.

Since I am talking about the art, let's put up a picture of the new art of the character Ilenia.

Recently I have been watching some videos by Adam Duff LUCIDPIXUL which are essentially inspirational speeches about art. He really encourages you to accept yourself and to focus on being as authentic as you can with your art. I think they have really helped me to refocus myself. Even if they are specifically targeted to digital painting everything he says applies to the being a creator in general. 

In the past I have spent a lot of effort trying to basically recreate scenes from anime and make characters that remind me of certain characters that I like. It was a decent way to build up some skills but from now I want to try to step into my own style. What is that style?

Ever since I was young I have favoured intricate drawings. Something like a spaceship with all sorts of little parts drawn onto it. More recently I have gone into drawing colourful abstract art, which I have incorporated into the game's backgrounds. So I wanted to be able to get something like that into Ilenia's design since she has ornate armour. I had this vision of cats playing on her armour for a couple of weeks. So I added a lot of these ornate cats. Too many. I had half the number of small cats, but overall I am pretty happy with the design. For Lucia I didn't do much - since she is a merchant the plain dress seemed about right. I am hoping to do some work on more of the characters (though there are always a hundred other things to do.)

Until Next Time