I was thinking it might be a fun thing to post all the sketches here that I did for various things each month. I often can’t post the finished stuff for my Patreon page (as an example) but the sketch work should be fine. And that give you fine folks a little more info on what I’ve been up to.
Additionally, I’ve been spending a bit more time sketching lately without taking the images through to completed work. So there’s more for you to see.
So let’s get started! (Click on individual images to embiggen.)
First up, we have the Gust Goblin. I’ve been working on a set of variant goblin types for folks to use in their TTRPG sessions. This one has an air theme, and the others will (of course) be earth, fire, and water. There will also be a fifth associated with The Void – which is something I’m wholly making up.
I’m hoping to develop a whole series of variant creatures with these 5 types eventually, but one thing at a time, so I’ll work on getting this set done and go from there.
It’s taking me a bit of time to build out the stats / crunch for each of the variants because I’m a bit new to all that.
I’ll post each of the individual variants to my Patreon page first, but then I’ll bundle them together and make them a Pay What You Want title on both my Gumroad and DriveThruRPG.
I believe I actually did the sketch work for this one a while back but I’m including it because I did the inks and colors in December. Plus, I like the little guy.
I created the character as a way to say thanks to my Twitter Pal The Goblin’s Notebook. He’s created a web app that is his namesake. A simple, elegant, and powerful tool for tracking all of your TTRPG campaign notes online in an intuitive way.
If you find yourself struggling to find the thing you’re looking for in your old spiral bound notepad, I strongly suggest checking it out!
This one was a bit of an experiment. I was trying to figure out how to stream live on YouTube using only my iPad since that’s often all I have available to me when I’m on the road.
I was… marginally successful.
Anyway, while doing that, I asked folks on the fediverse (via my profile on mastodon.art) what they would like to see. One person mentioned a mul character. Muls being a fantasy race I’d never come across before, I liked the idea. I did a little digging and found very little in the way of artwork for female muls, so here we are! There’s a lot of potentially triggering content involving muls, so I wanted to hint at it without doing anything that would be overt and clearly triggering. That’s how we came to this moment where she’s clearly standing up / rebelling / starting a revolution.
The first of my holiday themed images for the year. I was thinking about doing postcards. Then, after I procrastinated for a while, I thought about e-cards. Then I just said “Maybe next year.”
Sigh. Distractions, man.
Anyway, I like this little bugger. Goblins have been a bit of a theme for me of late.
I’m okay with this.
Another holiday themed goblin sketch. I was really just playing around with different ideas for holiday / wintery images. The goblin in this one is a bit too angry looking, but this was just the sketch stage.
Also, goblin.
Still playing around with winter / holiday themes, but a little less ‘funny’ or ‘cute’. I really liked giving this orc a pair of dire wolf companions as a parallel to Santa’s reindeer. Not a huge stretch, but I liked it.
This is a weird sort of amalgam character from my childhood. Back when I was in high school (and the dinosaurs still roamed the planet) I created this guy as a small rebellion in my introductory chemistry class.
Even back then, I enjoyed drawing high fantasy stuff, and I thought that sticking Beaker’s head onto Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique was just hilarious.
He would continue to make appearances on occasion throughout the rest of my life, and yet, I think this may be the first time I’ve referenced him here on dragonbones.net!
That does it for this month!
All of the images above plus their inked (simple black and white line only) and color versions are available to all of my Patreon patrons for $2.
In addition, you’ll find bonus content, and I’m always looking for recommendations from my patrons.
@mrlich@dragonbones.net interesting to note how Masto modifies the layout of blog posts – collecting images at the bottom. This makes sense given that’s how Mastodon users are used to seeing info, but it’s something I’ll be thinking about / paying attention to in the future.It also doesn’t seem to have included _all_ of the images. I would have expected that for anything more than 4 images, but it appears to have only included 3, and I’m unsure why.Anyone have any knowledge on this to share?
I’m thrilled to see that comments from the fediverse _do_ actually show up in the comments though (once I’ve approved them) so now I’ll see if it works in the other direction as well. (Though I have no reason to believe that they won’t.)