Doodle a day: 5/10/2013

Thanks to Baz Luhrman and his overlong Gatsby adaptation, yesterday's post of the below image and some colouring went out the window, bt a change is as good as anything, so it's a barer, monochrome doodle this time.

And it's a doodle with people! I realised that one skulking Batman wasn't going to cut it in the variety stakes, so here's another dream-based image, of a bar being set high up in (apparently) an old workplace with fancy mod cons, trendy patrons, great skyline views and an aquarium in every window.

Doodle a Day: 4/10/2013

Day Four, and I suspect I've been straying a little over the fifteen minute time allowance for my early doodling. I'll be honest, not all of my doodles arrive fully-formed; most are doodled in pencil then inked and the pencil lines erased, and that changes the picture. But I don't fix anything in Photoshop - that's definitely against the rules, and in the end Photoshop is used as I said it would be - for optimising the picture for web use, and for colouring it in if I want. But nothing complicated - frankly, complicated colouring-in is waaaay beyond my Photoshop skills!

Anyway, that said, I thought I'd try something simpler today and stick to my time limit. When an earlier idea simply didn't pan out, I decided to adopt a new rule: if an earlier idea doesn't pan out, start a BRAND NEW ONE. And here it is - based on a single word jotted in one of my doodling pads: the Ectopanzer!

I should also stress that, unlike the various buses of Wellington's CBD I have no handy tank around to draw from, so it's a tank from my imagination - don't go checking to see if it's an actual Panzer 'kay?

(Jeez, I don't think I've even drawn a tank in thirty years...)

The Local Gods

Last week The Almighty Johnsons finished, ending what has for me been one of the great, short-lived Kiwi TV series.

I know a good number of people who didn’t watch TAJ, and even some who wouldn’t watch it because it wasn’t “their thing”. Even I was skeptical before it aired. For some the fantasy element was a turn-off, while even among its followers it seems the show might not have been ‘fantasy’ enough, grounded as it was by a small country’s TV budget and envying the FX clout the likes of bigger overseas series like Supernatural (which is probably a close comparison) wield.  For me, however, the mix of fantasy and the series’ ‘real world’ aspects was balanced perfectly; so much so in fact that I’m bewildered that more didn’t watch it, including friends of the Simian household. The show is about Norse gods inhabiting the bodies of very normal, very relatable Kiwi brothers – what’s not to understand about that?

It’s the balance inherent in the Johnson brothers and their Asgardian alter egos that was crucial to the critical success of TAJ. A series simply about quarreling gods on a quest I’d have no interest in (particularly on a smallish TV budget shot in West Auckland; we’ve been here before), and similarly if I were to follow a series about brothers who rub each other the wrong way then it would have to be pretty interesting for me to get through episode one. TAJ did that with its essential third ingredient; its adherence to the traits – clichéd or not, of the Kiwi male. Taciturn, not particularly graceful or articulate, stuck playing roles in a man's world which, in some cases (Mike, Axl) they’re not the best at, and all the while resisting using their questionable godly powers (with the exception of Anders) to draw attention to themselves. Add to the mix the expected god rivals of Loki (how fitting that an amoral trickster god should inhabit the form of a corporate lawyer), a cabal of minor goddesses led by the brothers’ own mother, and the sometimes absurd coming-of-age and coming-to-terms of the youngest Johnson destined to become the great Odin, and you have a pretty good premise for one series at least. The quest of the brothers to find Odin's elusive Frigg, thereby assuming their full godly powers and leaving the world of men, however, was a thread that ran throughout the three years, kicking into gear well and truly in 2013.

I genuinely believe that if it wasn't for the daggishness, the frustration of family dynamics and male communication, and the adherence to a real-world low fantasy motif, I'd not have been a fan of TAJ at all. But how can you not be a fan of a series that posits wise god Baldr as a laconic stoned surfer, its god of poetry Bragi a pathological PR shill, or (best of all) its demigod Thor as a failed goat farmer from the Waikato with a hammer from Bunnings? Fantastic. And, conversely, not fantastic. Added to that is the genuinely smart plotting and scripting writing under Outrageous Fortune's chief scribe James Griffin, some brilliant twists and turns, and, that blessing in modern television, a satisfying series conclusion. The series 3 DVD is already available; hopefully we might see a box set with the entire series in it. Waes thu hael, Johnsons, you've been quietly Almighty - and good on you, mate.

Doodle a Day: 3/10/2013

Time for another quick doodle post!

Not much to explain for today's effort: two robots fighting- or are they buses?

I'm a bit long in the tooth to be an 80s Transformers fan, though I do appreciate the aesthetic, and the idea - well executed - is a pretty cool one. I'm not pretending for an instant that this is well-executed; it is what it is, a quick knock-off scanned and coloured roughly in Photoshop. But that's it for now, and something you're probably not likely to see down the main streets of Wellington these days.

Doodle a Day: 2/10/2013

[In which your humble blogger draws one doodle a day and blogs it]

“Smokey is the Ghoooost!”

Here’s an early insight into the dreams I have. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

The above phrase is fifty per cent of what I recall of the dream I wrote down sometime in the early morning of the 1^st of November 2010, the other fifty per cent being pretty much the image below, of a ghost werewolf emerging out of a chimney stack.

My subconscious obviously thought it was worth my rest-time conjuring up, but to this day I’m blown if I know what it all means. There’s plenty more where that came from, trust me.

Doodle a Day: 1/10/2013

 For the past few weeks I’ve been hard at it most evenings finishing off some open-ended hobby work – a D&D adventure here, some miniature painting there, and all for my next wee blog theme.

‘Doodle a Day’ is a project I’ve promised myself for a few years now, and one which I intend to employ to kickstart a period of concentrated illustration work that (fingers crossed) will be coming up. I am an itinerant illustrator, really. Untrained outside high school, but an inveterate doodler, so I thought I should try to combine the two and see what happens.  The result will hopefully be an illustration blog for the duration of this month, with no set theme or style – I’m trusting that one or both will develop as time passes.

Here’s how this will work – the rules, if you will:

1.       I draw a fifteen-minute doodle - one per day, on any subject.

2.       I scan it and optimise it for public consumption - and no more

3.       I can colour it later if I want, but no more than that.

4.       I post it, with a brief explanation of its provenance.

Just to be sure I’d not be short of inspiration, some illustrations may be based on an earlier form of this project, ‘Doodle a Dream’, which ought to be self-explanatory. In 2010 I kept an irregular (in every sense) ‘dream diary’ – basically a bedside notebook on which to scrawl – sometimes literally, what I could recall from any dreams I’d woken from. Being then a parent of a young child with eccentric sleeping patterns helped the process, but I fear some themes crept in, and so I’ll space these out with more mundane subjects if I think things are getting a little bit ‘trippy’. Maybe I’ll explain which ones are the dream-based doodles, or maybe I won’t!

And so, here’s the doodle for today, the 1^st of October 2013:

This is one of my favourite buildings in the Wellington CBD. I like it because it has some key points of interest: it’s a clock tower, it has a frieze on top of it and a cool spike that might be useful for tethering passing zeppelins to, and being an Art Deco-era sandstone building surrounded by a mix of modern and older buildings, it’s pretty unique in the Wellington skyline. Not that it makes much of an impression, as it’s steadily being dwarfed by the office buildings around it – hence me being able to look down on it almost from my work! The best bit about this building? The clock doesn’t work because the building’s upper floors house a hotel, and the very clock tower structure is an apartment, with the clock faces as its windows. Now that’s cool!

Roll20: The Beast of the Broch

Well, as promised, via the online usefulness of Roll20 last weekend I GMed a game of my own creation, an old school Basic D&D game called The Beast of the Broch, with three other guys and only an equator separating one of us from the others.

The result? An experience actually not too different from my past games - we over-ran on time (by about two hours!), there was a last-minute stand off/scramble to escape on the PCs' part (which ran smoother than in previous games due to this one being simpler and having some 'emergency exits' built in), and I want to do it again soon! Ultimately we used a minimum of Roll20's features - an online dice roller (though we turned off the graphic interface), a map builder with separate levels for players and the GM (fun to make, but I spent nearly a week creating these due to me being a little too particular), and the text-box chat function which, when Skype fell over on occasion, was a perfectly fine compromise.

So, all in all a fun game with some joking around, some 'character moments' or opportunities for genius/heroism/novel alignment play for the PCs (something I work at to foster in my games as it makes them more satisfying all round), and a bit of mystery. There' some discussion of the mechanics behind the game story after the jump below, but in short Roll2 provided most of the short cuts I needed (apart from the monster stats, roll tables and the like - a handy GM shield close by did the job though) and removed some of the messier game mechanics while still providing the visual clues and dramatic dice rolls. I'll stick with Roll20, I reckon, and see if I can't unlock some of its other features to ease play a little more.