Dungeons and Drawings art stuff (new: Nixie)

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I get the feeling one of you might be quite happy about this.

We decided to do two forms of the same creature: the tengu, crow-like humanoid swordsmasters. I did the crow-headed one, while Joe did the man-headed one. The man-headed one is the more dangerous of the two, being able to cast a good number of spells in addition to being a good fighter.

[Tengu_temp]

I get the feeling one of you might be quite happy about this.

I wonder who might that be!

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I wonder who might that be!

Man, I don't even know.

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A hope you guys had very holly jolly Snowflake Day and will have a splendid New Yearsgiving. Me and Joe did creatures from the Frostburn book to match the frosty weather. Well, it's probably frosty where some of you are. It's mostly rainy and windy where I am.

I did the Urskan, which are armored polar bears. Curse you, Phillip Pullman, for making this a fantasy requirement. Joe did the Uldra, little frost people who are really fond of tall hats. They're also one of the player races in the Frostburn book, which I think is a cool idea and would play (chilly gnomes!).

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This time we did the Vine Horror and Vargouille (doubling as the first official image of 2013).

The Vine Horror is a plant creature, an algae hive mind with the ability to control nearby vines. It normally adopts a vaguely humanoid form, presumably to lure people lost in the shadowy swamps. Since they lack bone structure, they're able to squeeze through tiny spaces. Spaces a mouse could crawl though. Work with it.

The Vargouille is a D&D classic. It's a severed head with large bat wings instead of ears. It might sound ridiculours, but you just wait until it paralyzes you with a shriek, it forces a kiss on you, and your head tears itself from your body to follow it.

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Dungeons and Drawings has now reached 200 monsters! No repeats. It took a while for us to pick an appropriate theme but eventually we found some monsters we haven't done.

The theme is classic big bads.

I did the Red Dragon, practically the mascot of the whole game series. It was quite fun designing the dragon's face. I probably should've gone a bit crazier with the body, but whatevs.

Joe did the Lich, a much more colorful take on the usually quite drab and sombre creature. Just because you're an undead blasphemy, this doesn't mean you colour sense should wither away too.

[ShadowFireLance]

Heh, That Red Dragon is awesome dude, Keep up the good work!

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More stuff from us. It feels like Joe's ahead of me in quality in leaps and bounds, but I guess it's pretty normal to feel intimidated by somebody else's incredible artistic prowess.

On my side we've got the Worm That Walks, a lich that isntead of being a corpse, it's a pile of maggots. I also did a Xerfilstyx, which is a quite interesting devil based around confusion and forgetfulness.

On Joe's end there's his fabulous Werewolf (I like to call him Wreck-It Ruff) as well as a very nice drawing of a Xorn, one that makes it look like a for realsies earth elemental.

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More creatures for this week. I was a bit late (again) due to work, but I feel I managed to make something kinda interesting. I did the Yeth Hound, taking inspiration from the acutal mythological origin of the creature. That being a headless hellhound that hunts souls lost in the moors of the British Isles.

Joe took on the Yuan-Ti Abomination, one of many of the breed of corrupt snake people. We looked a lot of cute photographs and videos of snakes for this.

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These creatures end a theme that we were using for the last many few weeks: the alphabet. I end that run with the Zaratan, a giant turtle-island. Curiously, the creature is listed in the Arms and Equipment Guide instead of a Monster Manual, under exotic mount. The ironic thing is that it isn't much of a mount, i.e. a creature than can be confidently directed by a rider. The closest thing to guiding you can do with it is have a singer stand on its head and sing to raise the turtle out of its stupor. Having it go in the direction you want is even trickier.

Joe's image was the Zodar, which you'd think is quite boring if you just went by the image in the book it comes from. It appears as suit of black armor, but its filled with some kind of muscle tissue and can briefly double its strength. It can also grant wishes, though it can only do this once every hundred years and its usually a quite subtle thing. Often the wisher doesn't know that a wish has been granted.

[Tengu_temp]

I am amused by both of those.

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We don't tend to do elementals that much at Dungeons and Drawings. It's partially due to the fact that they tend to be kinda samey, in that they tend to be an amorphous mass of fire/air/earth/whatever. There's a bit of a blurry line between elementals and outsiders as well, since some of the more interesting element-themed creatures are classified as outsiders.

We managed to find some elementals that are quite interesting though. I did the Fire Bat, which is probably one of the more vexing video game level creeps, and is actually quite tough in D&D. By eating a target (i.e. dealing a certain amount of damage) the fire bat stands a chance of becoming two new bats.

Joe did the Immoth, which is an ice elemental with a runic theme. They're creatures obsessed with written knowledge as the product of a curse. Specifically, they're cursed with having to find the words of the spell that the wizard used on them and take them to their planar home (The Mountain of Ultimate Winter). They carve spells onto their bodies, which they can activate in the same turn that they cast an actual spell, making them pretty dangerous.

[Tengu_temp]

These pictures usually make my day. Especially when something like this bat appears.

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Been a bit late with updating the blog the last few weeks. We're both really busy with a job right now that requires us to work longer hours and not have that much weekend time. But we've been striving to get stuff done regardless.

My images are the Skirr and the Zeuglodon. The Skirr is a huge undead creature, a flying mummified thing with a bovine head. It's not especially intelligent, but it's smart enough that it knows that picking someone up, then dropping them is a good way to get some food.

The other creature is a Zeuglodon, which is an actual animal from Earth's past. This is what one of the steps in the whale's evolutionary path was. I wanted to do something different with this creature and meant to have it done a few weeks earlier. But I'm not used to working with physical materials and photography, as you can tell by my largely digital portfolio. However, it was still fun to do. It's all largely papier mache type stuff with painted paper glued on top. The raft was the funnest thing to do, since I had to go out and look for sticks of the right size.

Joe's images are the Porcupine Cactus and Semnurv. We've been doing some experiments lately by giving each other "blind" monsters; we give each other pages of the book with the image and name of the creature removed, so we only have the description to go on. Both these images are blind for him, and the Skirr was blind for me.

A Pocupine Cactus is more a hazard than a monster. It's a cactus that explodes into pulp and thorns when it's touched or feels especially violent vibrations. The Semnurv is an actual creature of Persian mythology, a colourful winged dog, with an infamously mocked 3.5 image. I feel this one's a good deal less cringy.

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"Not dead, just slow" should become our blog's catchphrase. We really need to figure out a buffer system.

So we've been continuing to do blind drawings (drawings without any reference images or even the name of the monster, just stats and descriptions) and I think we're doing quite well. Also we did a little bit of cheating and a pair of the drawings are of characters we're gonna play in our next Pathfinder game.

My images:
Carcass Eater: a large rat-dog creature with lotsa teeth and a blood scenting ability on par with sharks.
Jammy Dodger and the Marmelooze: my character, a gnome alchemist/summoner. These games are all about the fluff through, so she's primarily a cook whose recipes go into the supernatural with hyper-concentrated lemon juice and sentient jams.
Duergar: the hateful dwarves of the Underdark. They're pretty cool and seem like their invisibility and enlarge person abilities would make them hella treacharous.

Joe's images:
Asherati: red-skinned humanoids capable of swimming though sand and producing a lamp-like glow.
Slok the Frogwarden: a half-orc druid. Joe took the pack lord archetype so he has four giant frogs following him around. He'll also be transforming into a frog with his wild shape.
Petal: a quite neat little fairy straight from Shakespeare. They sing you to sleep and you wake up in a few hours to find your armor piled neatly nearby and your clothes replaced with some quite charming leaf and flower couture. They have Craft (flower arranging) as a skill.

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Starting to get a little bit back on track. Joe's gotten himself a shiny new Cintiq which he used to make his drawing, the Dretch, a smelly and stupid demon, the abyssal equivalent of a Lemure. The Cintiq is quite a tempting bit of software. I may borrow it at some point to see if it's worth getting my own.

I did a blind image this week, and am quite proud that my image of a Nashrou (strange predatory animals of the abyss) is quite different from the one in the book. Still, I think the one in the book has a more interesting shape.

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We've been pretty busy on the last two months on a couple of jobs and been neglecting the blog a bit. We've tried to make up for it by doing all the classic elementals in a row.

We've been helping with a couple of music videos. The first of for Binary's G.O.D. and the second one is for the Arctic Monkey's Do I Wanna Know. They were quite fun jobs, but also very very tiring.


Joe:
-Centaur: half horse, have human. In this case a topless lady. So NSFW.
-Summoning Ooze: an ooze that... summons monsters. The more HD it has, the more powerful the monsters it summons.
-Large Fire Elemental: a dancer of fire. One hot performance.
-Large Water Elemental: Bloop bloop bloop.

Me:
-Cursed Cold One (or Gelun): a creature that freezes into a block of ice unless kept as searingly hot temperatures.
-Aranea: a shapeshifting giant spider. They're not evil though, so that's good.
-Large Air Elemental: Tried to do something interesting with this. So here's a paper squid.
-Large Earth Elemtnal: Made of malachite. Because malachite is pretty.

[Bird]

Get out of town. These are so, so much fun. The amount of personality in each drawing--!

And is that Dr. Strange I spy with the cold one?