fantasy – unigon pics

Root

Last weekend I started a new campaign by a local DM and sadomasochist (I’ll return to this in a bit) at Secret Lair of Chelan, and is only appropriate I started a new character, Root.

Background to Backstory

I have a confession to make. I was half tempted to just roll a Level 1 and re-hash one of my old favorites such as Unnis, the dragonborn sorcerer who loves cinnamon rolls and yellow wine, or Stone, my innocent warforged, my equally innocent fallen Aasimar paladin, Erel, or even my more recent Kazumichi, a kensai from Pathfinder but set to 5E rules. My rational at the time was that I was not sure how much time I would be committing to the drop-ins, and partly I had forgotten to come prepared and only had 60 minutes before the session started to conjure something out of the ether, my head, or in this case D&D Beyond.

But never one to back done from a self-induced challenge, I opened up D&D Beyond and threw proverbial pen to paper and out came Root. Root was largely just born out of the decision to do something different than what I normally play, which is focused on damage output at the expense of all other considerations. Some might call it a play-style, I think of it more as a player defect.

One thing I love about RPG is just the randomness of it all. It’s a place where the rules are more like bumpers in bumper cars, keeping you from going entirely off the track, but not meant to stop you from trying. The roll of the dice force you, pardon the pun, to roll with the punches and improvise on the spot. And creating a character without a clear picture in mind at the start, it’s fun to see where you’ll end and who’ll find at the end of it all. It’s also lazy, but I’m not going to admit to you, dear reader.

Backstory, The Making of

As I was filling out Root’s character sheet and desperately trying to not min/max him to death (did I mention that player defect of mine?), I came to the section where you are asked for backstory. Again, I did not have any specifics in mind with Root other than to play a class I had not played before. And while I did not think backstory was going to be entirely relevant to these gaming sessions, I thought some amount about loose threads that would help me flesh Root out once we got rolling.

I tend to just play characters that act like I would in real-life; in equal parts due to I’m not creative in that way, partly due to I’m autistic and theory of mind is rough for me, and partly just because I hate having to pretend to be something I am not, even when given permission. I learned decades ago from my on the local high school stage, and I might add in my own estimation phenomenal success, to just act from parts already in me. Aside, I wonder what it says about me that I played Dr. Bester from Up the Down Staircase and Horace Gilmer, the prosecuting attorney in To Kill a Mockingbird? Truth be told, I was/am a horrible actor but I did have both 300 pounds of mass and a lot of bottled up teenage anger that was a good basis for parts that required a thunderous voice on stage. But I digress. Root started to form from my own persona living as a stranger in a strange land, sans the messianic undertones that reference implies.

The Seed of a Backstory

While we’ve been 10 years in the Chelan valley, I’ve worked remotely from a home office the entirety of that time. And given we have not been able to have children, outside the raising of our two Great Dane dog’ters, Sora and Kumo, we don’t have a natural circle of friends which might occur organically in the daily grind of raising children. Compounding all this, I’m reserved and introverted, and it’s not hard to imagine Root as an interloper of sorts. And of course, this is not a new sensation but one I’ve felt the entirety of my five decades. Add to fact that I live clear across the country from where I was born and raised, and you can start to see the similarities to myself and Root as a far traveler. Even the random selection of a “bird flute” as one of his instruments he plays as a Druid, has turned into a part of a deeper backstory. Gawd, I love this game.

The Backstory

I imagine Root as an odd child elf growing up. His real name is unimportant, since the name he earned is the one he bears today. He was curious as a child, insatiable to get to, well, the root of things. He never stopped asking why, or digging, quite literally and proverbially, at things till he understood the deeper meaning. And while others named him Root for these reasons, as he grew older the meaning took on new meaning. He became the friend to the forgotten ones, the unseen ones, the ignored ones of the forest. And for these, the roots are where their homes start and extend. For the mice, for the birds, for the toads and frogs. Even to those that burrow underneath, the worms and the spiders and the insects. He is friends to them all, even as his heart is dearest to the simple wood mice and sparrows who keep him constantly apprised of the goings-on, both under foot and over head. And while he’s very adept at squeaking his way through a conversation with mice, he indeed quite literally needs his bird-flute to communicate effectively with the fowl folks he meets. And if you think there was a play on words in that last sentence, you’d right. Some fowl are really foul; just look up the reproductive behaviors of ducks to learn what I mean. But I digress.

Root has now traveled so far from where he was born, under bough and over root, to find himself in a new land with new people. He never quite settles, even if he lingers in a place for along while. He cannot help himself in this way. Curiosity always get him, making him wonder what is past yesterday’s sunset or this morn’s sunrise. But now, he content to discover what the folks of this wayward tavern and its’ slime mold infestation have in store for him.

Making of a Portrait

Given that I share so much with Root, it seemed fitting I would sit for my own reference photos. Also, I’m inexpensive (free) and available. Also, I’m sure I’m a bit vain.

I started with a quick portrait generated by AI. It’s actually amazing what you can produce with a few words in under 30 seconds from your computer. I cannot say it’s a horrible portrait for Root, but it lacked the more rugged nature I envisioned for him. Nevertheless, it was a good start with a starting session only 10 minutes away.

Aside, I absolutely have zero issues using AI using it. (Okay, I have concerns but I’m also very pragmatic and fairly nuanced given I operate in this space leveraging AI for mental health therapy as a co-founder/CTO). And I appreciate the sensitivity people have around it, especially established artists and creators whose specific style or tone can now be duplicated with a few strokes who were hoovered by Big Tech with nary a thank you let along contract for royalties based on IP. But toothpaste and trying to put it back in and all that jazz hands apply. Aside, if you love an artist or author buy their work and patronize them; don’t use AI to plagiarize their style, no matter how tempting it is. PSA done.

But in all seriousness, what I love more than playing a character is illustrating them. So, the real secret why I scrambled to roll a new character was that I wanted a seed of an idea for my next piece of artwork.

As noted above, I play characters that represent aspects of me. There are universal themes such as free will that come up in all of my characters. And sometimes you can see me more directly in a portrait such as with Kazumichi (or 和道) which is the name I adopted for myself while living and working in Japan. But I think Root may be the closest I’ve come, at least externally, to largely being my alter ego, is really just me as I see myself in my fifth decade of life. I am not nature person per se, but I’m most open under open skies and open roads. I grew up being bullied, and I see in myself a pattern of having both a soft spot and protective tendencies to all of us who are unseen or ignored, or are underestimated and not part of the mainstream. In this way, Root’s connection to the small mice of forest and field is this connection to myself.

So I stood in for Root. It did not hurt that I had mountain-man beard already grown in. Throw in a walking stick made by father, and a Carhart outdoor shirt and I look the part of a modern-day Root. A quick selfie with my phone and I had all I needed to get started. Receding hairlines be damned, I gave Root the one I wish I had, along with a fuller beard.

Most of the evolution of the illustration is in the lighting. I ended with two light sources in the end, largely to just help Root to stand out from the darker forest behind him, but also to help boost the idea that this character lives in a world unlike ours.

For myself as an artist, there is no point doing fantasy artwork if it just looks like a picture of a woodsman somewhere in Washington, so the purple lights allude to something magical or mystical, something just out of sight by the viewer.

What is the source? I honestly don’t know, but I suspect Root will out. It’s his nature, after all.

Original Root, AI generated and better looking version of my reference model.

P.S. While I cannot give specifics as it would be spoilers for future adventurers who join us at the tavern, I will say any DM that #tpk’s everyone in session 0 of an introduction to 5e D&D is one sadistic insert-non-PG-words-here. Thanks, DM-who-will-not-be-named.

P.P.S. Yeah, Root died already. But then the DM healed us. Because he’s an upright DM that did not want to get clobbered over the head with a long stick thing.

30 Years in the Making

30 years ago I tried to create a masterpiece. Discover whether I did or not. Or more precisely, learn how I took that “masterpiece” and made it better. And if not better then at least different.

Some thirty years ago while I was in high school I made a self-portrait using inks and water-colors (see below for this “masterpiece”). At the time, I was very much on a self-journey of a discovery of lines. I believed that all art was the intersection and continuation of lines, and as such my great conceit of that time was that all art was just lines morphing from one shape to another shape.

It’s obvious that this is a decidedly too narrow a view of art, but such are the thoughts of a teen living in a pre-internet day with too little access (or curiosity) of the greater art world, and too much hubris to go out and search for it. We’ll get back to this in a bit. First, a quick re-telling of the first self-portrait.

The Original, A Short History

As for this original self-portrait that I created circa 1992, I ended up giving this to my very best and dearest friend Nils Passion, then an exchange student from Germany. I never quite understood why he wanted it, at least on artistic terms it was not worth much mention. As if any of my art today warrants such mention is another such matter. But I digress and me being who I am, only on reflection I realize it must have been on a more human level of connection with me that gripped Nils to want such a piece; a realization that would never have come to me way back then. But again, I digress.

At some point, Nils or his parents saw fit to frame this work in one far too valuable for such a piece, but nevertheless they did and here we are today. My artwork in a gilded frame, a reminder to me that our friendship was valued far more than the art itself. That in itself is maybe worthy of its own post.

While recently looking at that rather baroque frame and my decidedly abaroque (sic) picture sitting in it, I thought it might make a good example of “progress as an artist” as it were. By doing a then and now comparison, I could capture my evolution as an artist over the last three decades. Albeit, to be fair that while it’s three decades on the clock, it’s really less than six years as an artist. To wit, I had largely been on hiatus to art, at least anything illustrative or painterly for more than two of those three decades. But that is a story for another time.

To Be An Artist or Not to Be An Artist

The short of it is that it was not till the time of my first visit to Norwescon back in 2016 did I entertain seriously getting back into visual arts. To be clear, in the years prior to this I had gotten quite serious into digital photography, and even dabbled with processing my own black and white medium-format photographs. This was while at Amazon when I met Tracy Boyd, part-time UX designer, full-time fine artist. I was loath to call myself an artist, but it was Tracy who insisted on the appellation, seeing in me something I could not see in myself at the time. For the curious, I saw photography as my way to come to terms with color. I hated using color in my teens. Color was magic, it was mystical. It was not meant to be used lightly, and as such I stuck to largely black and white artwork far into my early twenties as evidenced by my own self-portrait from this period. But again, I digress.

Prior to attending Norwescon for the first time in 2016, my partner Marit had recently went to a writers’ retreat where she meet, amongst other luminaries, Mark Ferrari. When she showed me Mark’s work, I arrogantly said (or minimally cowardly thought) I was as good as him. Hubris is something I have a few lifetime supplies of just laying around for times like this.

To be clear, I was not and I am still not anywhere close to Mark’s narrative abilities, visual or otherwise. But for whatever reason, seeing Mark’s work reminded me of my own work from my high school years. While too long to fit the full telling within this post, I had a conflicted relationship with the arts that culminated in me “leaving the arts” in my early twenties. Suffice it to say then that when I saw Mark’s own work it awoke in something I had forgotten I had ever possessed: a passion to be a visual story-teller. I yearned to be like Mark. I ached to be an artist. I needed to do art. Not photography; not that it is not art; but, I wanted to do art like I used to create for the first two decades of my life: with my hands, telling stories that only I could envision in my head.

Discovering I’m Not All That

So I got myself an iPad Pro, Procreate.app, and Apple pencil and immediately discovered I sucked. Not like sucked bad from my times from high school, but like sucked bad as if “I had never drawn a line before in my life but still delusional that I was amazing-balls bad”. That kinda bad. In short, bad bad. Insert a line about Dunning-Kruger here.

I was more than naïve about art and my abilities, I was whole cloth ignorant. Even wantonly ignorant. I had forgotten about composition. I had forgotten about values or shapes. I had never learned color theory. I had never seriously studied anatomy, if you can count Marvel Comics guide to drawing figures as anatomy study. In a word, I had forgotten everything and worse, had not really spent the years learning the fundamentals during the first two decades of life; pre-requisites to what it takes to create art or be an artist. I had no real foundation to draw upon, even though in my mind I was a Michelangelo just waiting to put brush to fresco to paint masterpieces. It was humbling in the mightiest of ways, and no amount of hubris (and I had and still have a lot) could anneal me against this truth.

To another person this might be common-sensical. I had spent more time “not riding the bicycle” as I ever had done riding it. It would be natural that I’d not be as good as I had been, but that was not a truth I was comfortable with at that time. In my head, I was a gifted and talented artist. Granted, maybe I was at the time of measurement; as a teenager I was moderately talented, but talent is but a mere accelerant. Talent in and of itself does not make you an artist, and especially not a master. Skill does, though.

Skill is something to be acquired, to be learned through the hard knocks of life unlike talent that is doled at in varying degrees at birth. Skill comes from thousands and thousands of hours of practical study. At the end of it all, talent provides but a thimbleful in comparison to the ocean that skill provides.

Thankfully for myself, I had matured a bit in three decades, and more than any amount hubris I’m maniacally accountable to myself. If I say I am an artist then I ought to get to the work of becoming an artist. And so, starting in 2016, I got started on trying to prove to myself that I was truly an artist – not just some memory of one – by setting out to acquire the skill necessary.

Some six years later and I’m still learning the fundamentals. I do not practice nearly as much as I would like. If I had as much discipline to art as I do to exercise, I’d be light-years further than where I am today. But still, I’m making progress. I have even done some professional work on the side that I’m moderately proud of.

As a consequence, as much for myself, I wanted to try my hand at something I had done in the past. I was curious how I might re-interpret something, both as an artist and as a person, with thirty more years of lived experience to draw upon (bad pun) along with the most recent six years dedicated to improving my craft.

Today’s Self Portrait, A Short Reflection

As I noted above, when I was in teens I saw all artwork as lines. So when I re-created this piece, I wanted to keep that philosophy intact. However, given I was not using linework, I instead tried to use values and color to tie elements together. In this regards, clouds morph into eagle and dragon, my face melts into muscle that flows down to a digital waterfall, and so forth. I’m quite pleased to be keep with the spirit of the self-portrait, even if this new approach is fundamentally different.

I think it’s pretty clear to even a casual observer that the original piece was not just naïve in technique; it was also thematically naïve, too. While I did not want to drastically to change the composition, I did want to reinterpret parts of it to be have a fuller vision of the original theme of the internal aspects of myself flowing out of me as expressed by the aforementioned connection that all things are lines.

On top of just making the piece more complete, I also wanted to incorporate elements that are more emblematic of who I am as I approach my fifth decade. In this aspect, the biggest addition is the dragon in the lower left. If you’ve spent any time on this site then I know I quite love dragons. I otherwise kept most of the other elements in the original, albeit with a few twists.

In regards to the muscle reveal on the right side of my face, it should be noted that this is not inspired by 進撃の巨人 (Attack of Titans), but instead my sister. It’s maybe a reasonable conclusion to make given my long connection to Japan, but it’s one of my older sisters who first introduced me to the concept. She had done pieces during her college years depicting people pulling their skin off like you would removing a shirt or parts, revealing the muscles underneath. I am not sure if she was inspired herself by another artist, but regardless, as an impressionable teen I was literally blown away by this, promptly trying to emulate this in my own pieces from that time.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the results of this re-interpretation. I think it shows a clear evolution in visual story-telling. From the perspective of technique it’s clear that I’ve improved my rendering, along with overall improvement to anatomical correctness with own portrait. I definitely do not suffer from a fear of applying color like I did as a teenager where, as I wrote above, I saw color then as something mystical in nature, aberrant even. I think this self-portrait is a vast improvement, and one that I’m proud of (for now). I will be curious to come back to this in another decade to see what else I might bring to the narrative.

Unigon Priestess

I started this piece in Paper.app on my iPad. I was more curious whether I could use the app for quick sketching or not, and of course, you can. Unfortunately, I did not find its export features usable – for whatever reason my app just kept stalling – so I ended up taking a screenshot of the image in order to export. Once exported, I just imported into Procreate.app like any other image I might have drawn.

Crash Course: Color Theory

I have a confession. I have no inkling about color. Whatever I know is purely instinctual. I’m much more comfortable staying to grays, and reserving color for symbolic purposes (think Dexter’s inability to see any color other than blood as red).

where next?

This originated as a few quick lines that more got down the impression I was seeking, albeit it missed some of the anatomical accuracy I had hoped for. Nevertheless, I’m pleased with the final image as I feel it conveys convincingly a rider and its dragon looking to see where to go next. Ironically enough, the rider took the greater part of my time to get right to my satisfaction, especially in terms of getting the saturation levels right. If you watch the video below, note that I added the rider only after the dragon which was already near its final, colored state.

https://youtu.be/h1o4t2ydY24