Posted a quick update on my progress for Caravan! over on my blog.

tl;dr - It's coming along nicely.

I'm pretty stoked about this project because the Venn Diagram of "What I Think the Gaming Public Wants" and "My Game Design Skillset" are about as close to a circle as I think I can come up with in the present.

Full honesty? It's pretty simplistic, and may turn out to be a flop, but I think it's worth giving a shot and see how people respond to it... or don't.

Also? I think it's fun, so there's that.

I went through the Wayback Machine and found an old post that I wanted to update for my TTRPG audience. The updated version is now live over here, if you're interested. In short: both weighted and unweighted random selections from lists, which makes for useful tools for TTRPGs, worldbuilding, writing, etc. But I do it without the use of AI - which is (obviously) an easier method, but since some folks are super anti...

Just wanted to let y'all know that I did a blog post over on my Patreon blog about The State of the Art - referring to my current project list and goals (art wise). It's freely available to read to the public - no membership or subscription needed.

Check it out, and feel free to reply here if that's easier and you're so inclined. :)
ETA: strange. There's a link at the bottom of my 'edit screen', but nothing is showing up in the actual post for me. *shrug* I added the link above in case / for future reference.

I've been feeling... bleh for the last few days about art. It's not all that uncommon, and I know it will pass, and (perhaps more importantly) I know that the only way past it through. Insert reference to Stephen King and doing the damn work regardless, and blah blah blah.

Anyway. Started out doodling Dagger of Cloak and Dagger (in Marvel) and SQUIRRELed to drawing portraits over blorbs. Then SQUIRRELed from that to this. Digital painting sketch.

As always, it's been about 5 minutes, so I already can only see the flaws, but I like the direction it's headed anyway. I intentionally got rid of the lines so that I could focus on painting rather than lines. Challenging, but not impossible.

ETA: I did not get that illustration job I mentioned in a previous post. This is not really a surprise, just disappointing.

I'm putting together a thing for folks to enjoy. It's a zine of sorts (PDF) with a collection of 'blorbs' (oddly shaped blobs) in very light grey. Print out the zine, and you have an instant collection of games for kids on a road trip, or with a collection of friends at the pub, or... whatever.

Now, I'm just trying to come up with different 'games' you can play. I've done plenty of 'draw faces with the blorbs as their silhouette' myself. Then, you can really insert whatever noun you want in place of 'faces'. Draw trees with the blorbs as silhouette. You get the idea.

But then, I thought - what if you made the page of blorbs into a fantasy map with each of the blorbs as a separate country?

Or, make each blorb into a full character defending their territory against the other blorbs.

Or... I dunno - what have you got? 

(Thanks to Jill "xtingu" Knapp for the term 'blorb'.)

So I decided that I would like a reference place for myself of all the kickstarters that I was involved with for 2025. With the idea that it might be of interest to some of you, I thought I would share that info here.

January

In January, and after our successful Kickstarter Gone Fishin', we decided to do monthly thematic one-shots for D&D.

So the first up was January's Gone Snowballin'. In short: a snowball battle for your D&D group.

February

For February, the obvious theme was romance, given Valentine's Day, so we built out a 'speed dating' one shot (Gone Speed Datin'), and I had a bit of fun with one of the NPCs who might wind up across the table from your character (above) while the cover art was a bit more... tame.

March

Gone Pub Crawlin' was inspired by Saint Patty's Day. We used some art I did a while back for the teaser. I really kinda love that little dwarf. Goes way back to an early post in my Patreon.

Here again, the final cover art was pretty solidly different, but I like these characters, and it feels like they're crawlin from pub to pub, so...

April

April was antiquing themed. I've no idea how / why April is associated with antiquing. 

Fun Fact: The character in the cover art for this one was originally something I started sketching up as another NPC for Gone Speed Datin'. I thought his open shirt, machismo laden body language, and cock eyed smirk made him perfect for lining up across from in a speed dating scenario. But when the guys saw it, they said we had to keep hold of him for Antiquin'. I still don't fully understand why, but was just happy he would find a home.

May

May was Gone Bee Keepin'. I went... a little different with this one. I really worked hard at using shapes to construct the image rather than lines. That's pretty solidly against my normal process and I found it challenging. While I'm not in love with the resulting image, I did learn a lot, and feel certain I could do something much better next time. I also did a bit of homework to figure out what sort of protective equipment medieval beekeepers wore and that's reflected in the final art. 

June

June was the first Wayward Pages bundle. Brad and I have been doing the Location Lexicon for some time now, and we decided to try bundling together  some of them and presenting them to the Kickstarter audience. They seemed to like it, though, in hindsight, we didn't do nearly enough promotional work to make it a real success. More learning as we go. Still, it was nice to see characters and art that I'd been working on for so long actually see the light of day.

It also worked out perfectly because the crew I normally work with on Kickstarter projects was taking the month off for personal reasons.

July

July was Gone Surfin'. I went a little nutty with the cover character's pose, but it was fun, and it seemed to play well with folks. As with most of these, I could tweak this endlessly.

September

September was a busy month Gone Foragin', with the regular crew, and then Matt (the writer / designer of these) did his own separate KS for Beyond the Mycelium.

For Gone Foragin', I again stuck to using shapes far more than lines, and I definitely like the results more than I did for Beekeepin'. Rapid artistic growth for the win!

For Mycelium, I did a whole painted cover, and really enjoyed the process - especially creating characters in a scene that are supposed to be mushrooms.

October

Obviously, October was Gone Scarin'.

Another fun one for me to create, and honestly, I was finally starting to feel like I had the process down for this one. It's a little... open? to me now, but it once again felt like a solid step in the right direction for me as an illustrator.

The large, blank banner eventually held the title of the book.

November

November was Gone Huntin' - with characters in competition to bring in the biggest / best game. Of course, there's a bit of a twist...

I had to hurry through the cover art for this one for 'life reasons', but overall I'm pretty happy with it, and once again I learned a bit that I will be able to use going forward.

December

December was Gone Sleighin' - a snowy race in sleighs pulled by various creatures.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this one was both fun and educational. It felt like my composition and layout game was on point, and I like our elf friend in the front. I made the forest of trees a bit 'generic' in order to make sure they didn't detract from the rest, but looking back, I wish I'd made them a little more unique.

...and that wraps up the Kickstarter work that I did in 2025. That wasn't all of the art that I did in 2025, but this seemed like it warranted it's own separate post / archive.

What's your favorite? What would you like me to have done that I didn't?

I hadn't realized it, but aside from the sketch I did the other night of the blacksmith, I haven't done much character art for some time. Since I made some headway with Caravan! last night, I gave myself the 'treat' of doing just that.

The game is pretty focused on some 'coming of age' themes, so characters will likely be young by default. This image will go in the 'heritage' section of character generation, which gives a sense of what equipment they start with. So our heroine here is using hand me downs which could maybe fit a bit better.

She'll get cropped a bit in the rulebook, but you lucky dogs get to see the whole image (which I did because I didn't like the idea of cropping her to start).

Today was another good day for games. I started the day working on replacing the image that Brad had been using for Maze. I'd forgotten, but he pulled the image from somewhere on the web as a 'placeholder', but he doesn't own the rights to use it. So I went to work figuring out something to put in its place.

Then, I headed down to King of Prussia, and an event at (of all things) the Wegman's cafe. I'm not sure if there was name for it, but it was a game designer meetup. Met some new folks, and one or two (of the half dozen I met) really seemed like great connections in the community. Both knowledgeable and had a clear desire to help.

In addition, there was one young guy who was clearly new to game design, and was asking a long list of questions. I was thrilled to be able to help answer a ton of art related questions.

The whole thing had a great 'people helping each other do what they love' vibe.

After discussing the thumbnails above with Brad, we settled on a base concept and I got to work iterating some possible options.

The original placeholder, the base design I'm working on, and the 'hero / move' token as a sample of the other icons so my medusa will have enough of the 'look and feel' of the others as to not stick out in a bad way.

Potential Work

So a friend directed another friend to me. The third party is offering (what sounds like) real money for the project - between $1k and $2k.

They sent me an early edition of the book. It's a collection of magic items. Between 3 and 4 / page. There's about 100 pages. And they would like a full color illustration for the front cover.

So the math breaks down to about $6.66 dollars / image if I assume only 3 images / page AND they go the full $2k.

And that's without a cover illustration.

*le sigh*

I (sincerely) appreciate that laying out a couple grand out of your own pocket feels like a lot. Hell, it is a lot. But the amount of work he's asking for...

More info as I have it.

In the meantime, the gooder news:

Caravan!

I'm working pretty hard at a game I'm creating and I'm currently calling Caravan! The idea behind it is really pretty simple:

Create a simple character, who agrees to join a caravan that's going on a 30 (or 31) day trek to provide support of some kind. Use random tables to determine a daily prompt and then write ~1,667 words on that prompt. Do that every day for a month. It's like a hybrid of NaNoWriMo and some of the journaling games I've been seeing that seem popular right now.

It all evolved from my efforts during the NaNoWriMo of 2022.

I'm pretty stoked about it. It's a very simple concept, but I feel like it has a lot of potential flavor without a lot of crunch. I'm not a crunch guy.

How about you guys - what are you working on?

Change the channel now, if you're not interested in my current thoughts on 'self help' for Yours Truly. I promise - I will not take offense. I can get pretty gag-tastic sometimes when others talk about it. I'm mostly writing this all out for myself.

The Problem

I'm 'driven to distraction' (just always liked that title). In my case, it feels more long tail than in the traditional sense. I follow a cycle of interest > disinterest > renewed interest > renewed disinterest even on things I really like.

It's when it gets difficult or frustrating that I have a knack for suddenly finding heaps of interest in something else. If I have related or connected interests, it makes it even easier to jump topics because working on one feels like working on the other.

With that in mind, I have interests in many different fantasy related genres, art, games, writing, and pretty much anything connected to any of those on some level.

If you're familiar with the concept of 80/20, I find that the real progress is actually made once you enter that difficult 20%. Or maybe it's better to say the progress that matters because anyone and everyone can do the 80% that only requires 20% of the effort.

But here's the thing - that first 80%? It's still a big part of the project du jour, so each time I come back, I find another part of that 'easy' 80%.

What does all this mean? Well, put simply: I spend a whole lot of time spinning my wheels and not getting anywhere. 

Current 'Solution'

Solution is in quotes because there really is no solution. You can adapt to the way your brain works, but that doesn't change how it works. Maybe that's okay. I'm not here to argue for or against.

The Big Picture Planning has been an issue my whole life. It has arguably ended relationships and deeply tried others. I'm too 'in the moment' for almost my whole life. Doesn't seem wrong, to me per se, but it makes things challenging to say the least.

So how do you improve things without a big picture plan?

Habits. Eat the elephant with one small forkfull at a time if need be.

This isn't a new idea. There's tons of literature. One of my favorites is Atomic Habits, but that borders on cliche at this point. (It's also fresh on my mind because Mom got me the new Atomic Habits Workbook for Christmas after seeing an interview with James Clear.

In short: Atomic Habits does a great job of breaking down habits and how to work with them effectively in similar sense to the way James Clear did with To-Do items in Getting Things Done.

If I was to simplify both into one sentence? Break big things down into small (and manageable) bites and then do those little bites.

But that all requires planning. You have to look at the big picture and break it down. That's the very essence of planning, and I fail to do it every time.

So I'm Going to Skip the Planning. Okay, honestly, only sorta. I mean, I'm doing the big picture planning right now, I suppose - just not with a specific project in mind.

So the simple concept is this: Pick as few categories as possible. Health (mental and physical), Wealth, and Social? (Still working that out.) and select some habits (again - as few as possible) to work on to improve those areas. Small, simple, easily attainable habits. Then work like hell to make those small habits routine.

That's it for now. That's the whole shebang. It's why I recently mentioned getting back on Habitica.

Wish me luck. Or don't. I'm not the boss of you.