I play a lot of Minecraft and I love the fact that if I don’t want to be in the snow I can walk in a straight line until I hit a desert biome (though jungle is my favorite).  If only it were this simple in real life.  I’ve been doing a lot more three panel strips lately to try and keep it weekly when I can, but fear not, there’ll be more full page (and multipage) strips to come.

Snow ticks are the worst, right?

I can’t promise this will be the last eye pun, but the end is within sight, as they get closer and closer.

Another comic done up on the tablet.  For some reason I like to alternate between vectors and pixels depending on the mood, oftentimes combining attributes of both.  I don’t suppose I’ll ever settle on which I like more, but that is sort of the purpose of this comic, to experiment and learn about art and comics and ish.

I have to say I am pretty proud of how everything came together, so I wanted to share a version sans text.

Pretty happy with how the inks turned out on this bad boy, simply because I got to use my tablet again.  I’ve been rocking the vector vibe for a while, so it feels good to work with pixels again.  My only regret is that I wish I had more time to work on the colors, but I really wanted to get this out within the week (on top of my full time job and part time job).

I’ve been pretty jazzed about this comic because of that last panel’s reveal.  So creepy/gross and it totally cracks me up.

I’ve given much thought to the monsters you fight in RPGs or videogames, just hanging out until you enter the room, and then pouncing.  What is it they do as they wait?  Are they waiting?  Or are you just catching them on the unawares?  Are you bursting into their home and murdering them and their family?  DM only knows.*

The ripped page is a total riff on the D&D pre-made scenarios, of which I have run quite a few.  Over the time though, I’ve leaned away from leaning on these, feeling that they tend to inhibit more freeform storytelling.  My current philosophy is to prepare some names for NPCs, some enemies, and some possible set pieces, then improvise based on what my players do.  It avoids railroading and makes me feel like a more dynamic story is being told, and one that I don’t already know the ending to.  That makes it all the more fun for me.

*I would like for people to start saying ‘DM only knows’ instead of ‘God only knows.’  I hope that catches on.

Another page done solely in Illustrator.  I am starting to get tired of it.  I end up focusing on minute details that aren’t going to be appreciated, let alone seen.  Speaking of which, here is a higher version of the fancy chest vector:

I have been having a lot of fun with the geometric tiling in this upper level dungeon, but that too consumes time.  Need to be better at prioritizing and focusing on telling the story and not on trying to create a perfect piece of art.  Basically I am saying I have so much to improve on.  Such is life.

Man was this a lot of dialogue.  A lot more than usual anyway.  The whole page was done in Illustrator, and I’m rather proud of how it turned out in the end.  It did make a lot of things simpler, but simultaneously made ordinarily simple things complex.  I think a good healthy combination of vectors and pixels works well for me, and I’ll try to find that balance going forward.

A special thanks to Marque for the name Mo and Austin for the name Mungo, who posted on the Dungeon Crawlers Facebook Fan Page.

This whole piece kind of happened by accident.  I’ll explain.

It started out as a background I was drawing in paint in my downtime, just roughing things out as I was bored.  I took the layout and brought it in to Illustrator to clean up and work with, and got a little carried away.  I was just going to do a rough layout I could work with in Photoshop, but I kept adding highlights and shadows and details, and eventually had something I was proud of.  At this point, I was thinking, I’ll take it into Photoshop and use it for the background in a simple 3 panel comic.  But I didn’t.  I kept on in Illustrator, creating vector versions of Bo, Jasper, and our two new guys.  I was really happy with how they turned out too.

I sent it over to the wifey, who asked for a desktop version, so I resized it and added some text and a word bubble (which sadly covered up a bunch of the background I’d done) and sent it over.  Then I realized I should share with others.

So download a high resolution background (1900 x 1200) and don’t forget to visit the Facebook Fan Page to give your input on the two new guys names!

Click it to big it.

Techy side note: Super proud of how the stubble turned out.  I did it as a scatter brush where a single piece of stubble is repeated and scattered at random intervals with random sizes, keeping their orientation in line with the curve of the path, giving a sense of shape and depth.  The lighting and shadowy lines were done similarly.  Illustrator rocks!