There's some events unfolding in my regular D&D group which mean that my character may soon be 'kidnapped' (sorta) and removed from the story. I'm in cahoots with my DM and I'm helping to build a pretty intriquing storyline with him. My character is... a major element, and I'm all in.

So with my character being away, my DM said I could play a new character, or an old character - whatever I like. I elected to bring back the first character I played with my current game group (and really, the first character I've played in 5e).

He's a half orc barbarian berserker named Wulfric. The character type (right down to his half orc-ness) is nothing shy of a cliche and I'm fully okay with that. I chose him in order to 'simplify' things for my first time learning 5e.

But here's the thing - he kinda grew on me.

What's more, I kept encountering moments when I felt like I could play Wulfric to the hilt, and it felt goooood.

Moments like when our group was fighting a collection of enemies and one of them had an imp as a familiar. It kept vanishing, attacking us, and then vanishing again. Wulfric reached out and grabbed it by the leg when it appeared (I rolled a nat 20, if memory serves) and he proceeded to beat the Imp's master with his own familiar!

I'm reworking an image I did of Wulfric back when I was first playing him. I'll add it to this post when it's done, but in the meantime, here's the original version (up top).

The Big Picture

Okay, so I won't bore you with all the details, but one part of my plan to take over the world is through selling t-shirts on Amazon.

There's no money in this. Not really.

I still want to do it.

When you start out, you can only have a maximum of 10 designs at a time. You can swap them out, but no more than ten at once.

I have a TON of ideas that I would like to make, but there's a catch. You only get more 'slots' once you've sold something like 1 or more of each of those initial 10 designs.

My Idea

As far as I know, there's no rule against selling those initial designs at your cost. I'm okay not making any money on those.

So I thought I would offer this up to my friends and family: I'll design a shirt based on your specification, upload the design, and sell it to you and my cost (Amazon's 'base' price). The benefit to me is moving past that initial stage more quickly. The benefit to you is a t-shirt that you want at about as low a rate as you can get (I think it's something like $13.)

How You Take Part

Just comment below (or email me) with your idea and I'll get to work.

Guidelines:

1. Can't use licensed stuff. If I draw Mickey Mouse, Disney will sue me into oblivion.
2. Can't be foul (blatant bad language or graphic violence is not what I'm looking to do). Comic book violence or @&*#$! works as bad language.
3. Please don't suggest stuff if you're not interested in buying a single shirt (or more) at the cheapest rate I can give you. It will just eat up my time, and you're not going to benefit from it anyway.

Anyone interested?

So I have managed to get very behind on #Smaugust already. The normal process to sketch, ink, and color a single character (or dragon) takes me a pretty consistant 3 hours. I speed up in some ways, but then I get nitpicky and add complexity etc which slows me down. So the magic number these days seems to be that - 3 hours.

Doing that every day is... very tough. Especially on days when I'm working long hours for TomTom.

So to allow myself to catch up, I've dropped back to just simple sketches. I still plan to finish them later, but I want to stay current in ordetr to keep myself motivated.

I managed to get caught up last night with this new philosophy, and I thought I would share.

Above is the Quetzalcoatl - day 5. While not a dragon in the traditional sense, it was on the list, so I thought "Why not?" Also, while I feel pretty comfortable with my limited Spanish, and have always felt very comfortable with the names of obscure mythological creatures, this one just evades my brain. Every time I want to reference it, I wind up looking it up. That's just... unusual.

Day 6 - Spider Dragon. I had fun dreaming up the anatomy of this one. It uses it's spinnerets to weave 'wings' of web onto it's hind most legs. It does this to blow victims into its webs, trapping them. On the minus side, I didn't merge dragon and spider very well - it mostly just seems like a monsterous spider.

Day 7 - Crystal Dragon. Yeah, this one feels rushed even though it took me more time than some of the other 'catch up' dragons. Referenced a number of different crystals, and saw way more internet woo-woo than I would have prefered, but I feel like this is... something. Not my favorite of these drakes, that's for certain. Maybe color will improve my thoughts on it.

Day 8 - Elemental Dragon. I like this guy (gal?). I thought 'nothing thin will work with fire/lava, so everything must be blunt'. So I didn't add wings, and its face seems a bit... pug like to me. I kinda dig it. I suspect colors will really make this one significantly better.

Day 9 - Western Dragon. I sorta copped out on this one. I went with 'western' as opposed to 'eastern'. A stylistic / anatomy based theme rather than trying to do something to imply 'wild west'. The latter would have been harder, and arguably more fun, but getting caught up was my focus, and I have a bit of a plan for these later and a wild west theme wouldn't have worked as well for that.

That does it for catch up. Today's theme (Day 10) is 'Brutish'. I suspect this one will be fun to do.

Some of you may be familiar with Inktober - where there's a list of art prompts for the month of October and the challenge is to create art every day from those prompts in ink. I've done it a few times and 'won' (succeeded) once.

Now I'm doing Smaugust. It appears to be far less popular, but given that I'm the owner of dragonbones.net, I figured I would give it a go. Of course, I have a bunch of other stuff on my plate, and shouldn't really be spending my limited time on a meme, but what the hell. I have an idea that might make it worthwhile (beyond the pleasure of doing it / the experience of 'stretching' a bit).

Anyway, I may a post thread over on Twitter where I'll be posting them every day. I'll probably do actual posts with info on how I made the different illustrations etc on my Patreon page and/or dragonbones.net. That said, I figured I would put the first few up here for you to get a feel for the challenge and what I'm currently doing with it.

Day 1 - the Aquatic Dragon

Day 2 - the Tribal Dragon

I may re-do this one later. I'm thinking about creating an ebook after the month is completed with a write up for each of the dragons to be used in TTRPGs, but this wouldn't make for a good creature as is. Of course, maybe it will be a magic tattoo or something... I guess time will tell.

Day 3 - the Subterranean Dragon

Day 4 - the Wolf Dragon

I went a little 'on the nose' with this one, but I just kinda wanted to.

I used the guy all the way on the right for reference from this pic. Obviously, I stretched him out and didn't stick with it very much. Perhaps it's better to say I used him as a starting point.

...the virtual kind.

So I've had DragonBones.Net since 20200928. After a blank page with just simple hypertext in the center which read 'dragonbone.net' and you had to click to enter, you came to a page which looked like this according to the WayBackMachine.org:

That seems about right, though I can't remember any reason for making you click on a link once you had arrived at the site in order to enter the site. It's not like it was a gateway guarded with a password or anything. If I remember correctly, the text was even grey on black, so it wasn't super easy to see.

I'm guessing I thought it was stylistically cool or something. Functionally annoying in hindsight, but hey - I was new to website building (more or less) and I probably stole the idea from other site I thought was cool at the time.

Those frames may have even been frames - remember those?! Maybe it was a table. Not concerned enough to really check.

Anyway, it wasn't too long until I added some more content, including some art, and (probably) an animated gif or seven of flaming torches in sconces because c'mon... DRAGONBONES.

Also, the size of that graphic demonstrates just how drastically the resolution of our monitors has changed over the years. That 'frame' pretty much filled my screen at the time.

Just a few short months later, and the WayBack has another capture. This one mid December of the same year, and I'd done some significant work on the site.

A lot more art, and that menu at the top was... *chef's kiss*. I mean, I was really proud of it. Why? Well...

1. Each of those skulls was based on an actual dragon illustration from the current Monster Manuals for D&D with the exception of the center skull - one of my own design and still the site logo today. If I recall correctly, two were evil dragons and two were good - with 'my' dragon in the center. Don't think I ever told anyone that. It was just interesting symbolism for me to think about when I opened the site.
2. Each skull was an animated GIF triggered by a mousover event. That took... a lot to the n00b that I was. I was using a pirated copy of Dreamweaver at the time to help me over the humps that I couldn't bash my way through when it came to code. I was completely ignorant of anything past rudimentary HTML, so that was a significant amount.
   1. The page displayed a default static image (as you see in the screen cap).
   2. Thanks to some 'onMouseOver' code from Dreamweaver, I figured out how to go from that static image to an animated GIF  that went from that same static image to a shaded / rendered / sorta 3D version of the same skull at the same size with a color tint and highlighted text over the image which said where the link would take you (same as the labels under the graphics - just in case the graphics didn't show for any reason).
      
   3. The image would return to a static image once you moved the mouse away from the image. Each graphic only changed once, so it created a feel like 'you changed the icon' by mousing over it to something 'more real'.
      
   4. I remember getting the sizing just exactly right so there was no 'flexing' of the table it all sat in took me 4-ev-ah.
   5. How did I get the animated GIFs of each skull? Well, I used some kind of 'morphing software' which took one image and morphed it into something else. Usually, this was done with faces. Think of the tail end of Michael Jackson's "Black or White" video. (Side note: do yourself a favor and watch that if you haven't in a while.) Anyway - I did two versions of each skull - one 'flat' and one 'rendered' with a tint' and fed them into the software as 'start' and 'end'. If either image was off by a single pixel? It would 'flex' the table holding the menu. That took some time.
   6. I managed to crunch those menu graphics down small enough that the load time was... reasonable. Back then, that was FAR more worrisome than it is these days thanks to X baud modems.

And look at that news feed! If I remember correctly, that was an RSS feed from my LJ account. I think. It miiiight have even been for only 'public' posts which I treated as a new feed for my site so folks could get the info in either place.

Lastly, I have no idea when I actually started drawing digitally, but I was definitely doing so by this point. St. Nick there as well as the aforementioned menu items were all done digitally. In 2003. That feels a little like having a cell phone when most folks didn't have a wireless land line in their house.

20080505 - It looks like I finally found out about this funky thing called 'WordPress' and switched over to GoDaddy.

In related news - holy hell with the dbn logo/crest. Calm down, dude. I'll say that it was a sign of the times and NOT my lack of good design skillz. For srsly.

20090303 - Some changes to layout (though that's almost meaningless with WP) and mention of 1100. There was one previous episode, but this is the first instance that the WayBackMachine caught.

20130602 - Thanks to Jill "xtingu" Knapp 's better sense of style, this is the first appearance of the billyBoldHand font (in the logo). I like it so much that it's become a staple and gets used in most everything I do if I can manage it.

20141217 - Pinterest style 'brick' theme. While the site has undergone some minor changes since this point, it's more or less stayed like this - a 'brick' theme (like Pinterest) so that I can show off more art thumbnails directly on the front page. This seems the most sensible layout for the most part, so it's stuck for years.

So why am I telling you all this?

I'm thinking about pulling the plug on Ye Olde Bones of the Dragon as well as a number of other sites I own / host. It's doing nothing for me other than being a vanity site at this point.

No one gives one rat's ass that the site exists. They certainly don't go to it.

According to Google's Analytics for the last 9 months:

It seldom goes above single digits and they're almost entirely 'new visitors' which makes me think that most of those are web crawlers, bots, and the like.

The site's been taken over more than once, and I'm not even certain that it's 100% clean now (which would help to explain some of the low stats since the Almighty Google would likely not rank a 'dirty' site highly).

You've Made It This Far, So Here's the Honest Truth

I put a lot of hopes and dreams into this site, and it's gone no where in all these years.

The analogy that keeps popping into my head is the lame horse that you deeply love, and don't want to see suffer anymore.

Well That Escalated Quickly

Yup. I can't imagine that you've made it this far down my meandering along Memory Lane, so it's time to just get to the fucking monkey.

She won't die completely. I'll likely keep the url and point it to a subset of posts or a page on mrlich.com.

Hell, I'll probably do that with most (all?) of my other sites - rideoffintothesunset.com, libriexmachina.com, lightinthewoods.com, matt-works.com, etc.

Same reasons. No one gives a shit, and I'm spending... well, not a lot per year, but over time...

Have you somehow managed to make it all the way down here? Well shit, you must have some kind of opinion on the subject - please tell me. I'm all ears.

Been a while since I did any Patch images, and I got the proverbial itch tonight, so...

Today, while driving, I was listening to The Creative Penn podcast. She was talking at one point about how it's better as an entreprenuer to have an online business right now because people can still purchase your books, and that will help you stay afloat in the hard(er financially, at least) to come.

My mind wandered as it pretty much always does. That brought me to the simple idea that art, in all its various forms, are luxuries. They're not absolutely necessary for us to exist. Yes, I know. I, too, feel like it's pretty much life's blood, but logically, it's not.

That, in turn, made me think about the fact that many (most?) folks will have to cut back dramatically on their purchasing of any form of art in the near future. I myself was thinking about how I need to go on a 'financial diet', and get rid of a bunch of recurring payment stuff that I simply don't need.

But here's the thing - if we assume that TomTom isn't going to be forced to take us off the road, AND that I'll continue to be employed there for the forseeable future and of course that I don't get sick, I'm going to be okay. I still have a job. Art doesn't pay my bills. This is probably the first time in my life I'm thankful for that, even if only marginally.

All of which brought me around to "But what about those who aren't in my situation?"

I got really upset at that thought.

There are just so many people who are going to be struggling. And the artists out there who have been scraping by with the income from their art? Forgoing the 'niceties' of things like health coverage because they would rather be creating than healthy? Or maybe a step up from that - those who were able to get by, but certainly couldn't put even a penny away for a rainy day?

Ouch.

I know that there's talk of governmental help. I know that creatives aren't the only folks who will be hurting. But I just felt like... I dunno. I guess I just want to do something to help.

I have no idea what that is / should be.

Any thoughts?

Sometimes I really don't understand folks.

And generally, my mindset can be summed up as:

ETA: I did a new episode of 1100 to add a little of my own mirth to the topic:

So I did another thing. More info in a blog post at my site.

The folks at gmbinder.com are kinda brilliant. They've built a website that makes it easy for any old schmo like me build a PDF with all the formatting of a Wizards of the Coast Official 5e Dungeons & Dragons manual.

You enter simple markdown into one window, the website interperets the markdown, and uses CSS to spit the content back out in a second window with all the formatting done for you. No need to learn about different fonts or spacing or... whatever.

I've seen a couple different incarnations of this kind of thing, but GMBinder seems to be the best of them - at least that I've been able to find. And it's 100% free - at least currently.

So when I first came across one of their competitors, the idea occured to me: "This would be a great way to promote dragonbones.net and my illustration services. I'll make a short "D&D Book" that is filled with my art and talks about how to hire me to create the art for your D&D book!" It's kinda meta, and I think folks would like that. I've never heard of it being done before, and the name of the game when selling anything is 'stand out from the crowd'. So if I do this right, I can stand out from the crowd while demonstrating just how perfectly I fit in with the crowd.

Oh shut it, Westley - it makes sense to me, and that's what matters.

Anyway - if any of you would like to have a look, you can find it here.

The cover is just a rough sketch, but all the art in it is my work, and I'm already working on a revision which will expand the book, provide more samples, etc. But with that said, I would love any and all criticisms / feedback / reviews / etc. Please - beat it up. :)