How Do Art?
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Hey folks, thanks for stopping by! I am still catching up here, but I am pleased to tell you that I have completed Week 32 of the #dungeon23 challenge, and am less than a week behind overall. Other things in life and work have been taking up a lot of my energy lately and I don’t have any deep thoughts about RPG design today. I do want to start sharing more art. Most of these sketches I’ve been sharing are just little doodles and colored pencil studies. Sketches are easy and loose. I don’t care if they are good. I have a much different relationship with completed work, especially for publication, and that can be a real struggle at times. Here’s a bit more about my current process for creating FINISHED ART.
In this instance, I was tasked to create a dungeon entrance in a hexagon for The Demon Lord Expansion for Twelve Years by Max Moon Games. I’ve done a few of these hex illustrations now and I enjoy the freedom and space they give me to work.
The first step is always composition and design. Thumbnails. Dozens of thumbnails. These are a few of the ideas I sent along to Max.
The two of us we will then identify design elements that make sense and, most importantly, look cool. This hex is meant to be a stone demon head at the back of a forgotten garden. A slightly more polished thumbnail, maybe larger, will be done to solidify the composition a little more. I always enjoy breaking the hexagon border with fiddly bits and I was having fun with silly plants and the broken path.
Once we've agreed on a good direction for the final piece, I will start a full-size drawing. I’m new enough to this that I’m still playing around with the relationship between drawing size and final print size, especially for zines. I think I’m figuring out that bigger is better. In this case, I think I started at about 160%, or whatever made sense for laying out a regular hexagon by hand. I also did something a little different with this batch of drawings…I did a huge amount of the pencil work in blue. Here’s what that looks like in process. Things are still pretty rough at this point, I’m still working out details and solving the puzzle of this space.
I might write more about blue pencils later. I did quite a deep dive to find the right ones for me, and I have a drawer full of all different types at this point. After the blues are done, I can just do one “finishing” pass with graphite to really tighten things up and get all the values right. This is that, scanned. A bonus of this process is that I get a lot less graphite all over the place, as I am a sloppy draftsman. You can see the amount of erased blue and overall smudging that it takes for me to get this far.
You’d think that would be enough, but no, still gotta ink. The pencils are scanned, blue is removed, and the remaining lines are printed full size…in blue, of course. I’ve been inking printed blue lines for a while now, and it makes a huge difference. By the time I’m done with pencils, my paper is torn to bits. Inking on a fresh sheet of Bristol is a dream. Still, this is the part that I have the hardest time with. This is the final version for all to see, and it must be perfect in all ways! It isn’t, and I’m growing increasingly ok with that. I’ve got some different techniques to work on, and I need to practice drawing plants. Overall, I’m pleased with this one. Most importantly, I learned a lot. That’s what this whole thing is for, right? Getting paid is also nice.
Ok, that got long. How about some dungeon maps?
Week 15: Players further exploring Sanctuary will find this level a little drier…for now. The strange people that lurk here are very protective of their home and their worship. Few among them can explain the actual theology of these creatures, and they seem to practice out of instinct and ancestral fear. Whatever they believe, it does seem to give them power.
Week 16: I was struggling a little bit with a way to keep this level interesting from a cartographic angle, beyond the usual weird dungeon/weird creature tropes. This goes back to my previous blog post about dungeon connections. So, what if different parts of this level are connected by a swift underwater river? It would provide sustenance for these people, and may be viewed as a divine gift in itself. But, what if it is also a deadly proving ground? Young warriors must pass this test to earn The Gift, and adventurers passing through this area may be challenged to a grueling race for survival.
Week 17: This spread format works a little better here than on the previous level. This bit in particular ties the rest of the level together by looping the river back on itself. Where does it start? Does it end? There are some fun and useful treasures to be found here if the PCs can navigate the river race safely. Previous dungeon levels may hold the means to do this. Satisfyingly, April 30th was a Sunday, so the month wraps itself up nicely on this page.
Week 18: And now for something completely different. What can you do to break up the monotony of a punishing, dark, wet megadungeon? Turn level 5 into a hexcrawl through a vast sprawling garden floating deep below the surface of the ocean. The Floating Gardens were always part of the plan, but never like this. The gardens surround the central shaft of the dungeon and mark a major transition to the lower half. I quickly realized this area will require a lot of extra work and some new procedures to think about, but I love how much it changes the feel of everything that has come before. It should make for a fun surprise when discovered.
This post has been converted from a previous Substack post and dated accordingly. Please let me know if it seems like something got lost or if you find any major formatting issues.
As always, thanks for reading! Please share and comment if you’d like. I’d love to hear your thoughts on art, process, and megadungeons.
Andy
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