It's been a while since I posted a screencast, so here's one of my process coloring one of Liz Hooper's black and white illustrations. (In HD Widescreen!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ-76YVcTsE

So, I'm taking her black and white pencil illustrations and adding sepia tones to create atmospheric perspective.

For each plane of perspective, I use quickmask and a soft brush to outline each subject.
Then I use that selection to make a layer mask around that subject, so only the subject is visible.
Then I use a screened color overlay on that layer so that the blacks turn into my desired sepia tones.

Repeat for each plane of perspective, making sure that the closer subjects are darker and higher contrast while the farther subjects are lighter and lower contrast.

Once the colors are in place, I add an offwhite paper texture on top of everything and Multiply that, to give everything a warm tone. I carefully mask out sections that should be lighter, though.

After that, I screen a grayscale watercolor texture to the paper texture, so the whites are knocked out of the paper, creating a cloudy washy feel. I add several of these watercolor textures to the clouds to they are brighter than the sky in the background.

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

My wife got me Invincible: The Ultimate Collection Volume 4 for my birthday, and of course I’ve already read through the whole thing.  I love this comic, though I say that as someone who doesn’t really have a regular comic reading habit.  (Mainly I read stuff in collections, often gifted or borrowed from a friend. This has the upside of getting lots of story in big coherent swaths, but it also has the effect of mainlining the entire season of a TV show in two days. You’re simultaneously full up of the good stuff, and empty because there isn’t a similar volume waiting for you on day three.)

Invincible has me from the word go. I know a few folks I’ve recommended the series to found it to come off a little flat, though several others have seemed really jazzed by it. I flippantly described it on Twitter the other day as “what Smallville wanted to be before it succumbed to a fatal case of kryptonite poisoning”, though I suppose that does more to tarnish the appeal of Invincible than elucidate it. (Ah, Smallville, what an acid-trip of a show you were before I took my leave of you.)  At its core, Invincible is the story of an alt-Superman’s kid, run through a heavy Peter Parker’s Life Sucks filter.  And boy, does it make my I-want-to-play-in-some-supers-genre-games itch flare right the hell up.

But I’m also not sure that I would want to play a straight up “adaptation” of Invincible at my gaming table.  So I need to deconstruct this thing, figure out what its basic working parts are, and which of those parts speak to me as a gamer. If only so my friends can get a little closer to running the game I want to play in! (That said, the analysis will not go that deep in the interests of keeping things spoiler-free.)

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Matt Wilson made a music for Do! It's called "Troublemakers" and it's more fun than a Balkan Beatbox chocobo race! Check out the mp3 here.

Matt has way too many talents for human physiology. I suspect his brain will soon explode in a shower of sparkles and win. See more of his stuff on his blog.

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

I just finished reading Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold, a sort-of sequel to his The First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and The Last Argument of Kings), in that it’s set in the same world.

I like grim fantasy (at least in some varieties).  The horrible things that happen to characters in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire are right up my alley (though I’ve stopped reading that series until the author finishes).  Glen Cook’s work ala The Black Company also sits right in my sweet spot.  It’s not that I hate heroes — I don’t — but I really relish the explosion of chaos when a plan goes pear-shaped, and the sudden, bracing losses that happen to the people in these books.  I suppose it feels real, or at least not-Hollywood.  I like my Hollywood stories, but I also love it when those conventions get torpedoed merrily.

That said, Abercrombie has pushed me with the books in The First Law.  My little inner Hollywood got hit with a mega-quake and slid right off into the ocean.  Things end so poorly for several characters in the books, and things are so brutal along the way, that I had to put a little effort into shaking it off.  But on the balance, after I while I found myself thinking that was pretty frickin’ cool.

Naturally, my thoughts then turned to gaming.

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

I’m a loud guy. This is mostly true in person, but completely true online.  I talk about what I like a lot, and at volume.  This blog is a part of that, but so’s Twitter and elsewhere.  I do my best not to push my way into faces that aren’t looking to hear me run my yap, but those who do will find themselves hit with a big wall of text.

Looking at this from a completely mercenary perspective, being loud in this fashion is very much about establishing a presence and a “brand of me”.  In the Internet Age, silence is equivalent to invisibility.  You might be out there producing great things and doing interesting stuff, but if you aren’t talking about it, and if other people aren’t talking about it, it may as well not be happening. Audience is king.

But beyond the whole “I’m loud so I’m seen” thing, I’m also loud in service of the things I like and love.  I’m loud so those things are seen, too.

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

Farscape probably wins my award for the best science fiction series I’ve seen in the last couple decades. It doesn’t win this because its special effects are particular greater than any other show out there (sometimes they’re decidedly average), or because its actors are unusually talented (though they have some hefty chops). It’s because the stories and environment the show presented were so full freakin’ throttle. Farscape rarely bothered to slow down and explain itself. The premise flew up your nose at light speed, genuinely alien aliens landed on your face, and it never, ever turned a soft edge towards you on impact when it could smack you with something hard. As a GM, Farscape taught me how to go for the pain and for the fun at the same time, and how to get everyone’s pulse racing right out the gate and never let up. If you hear Rob talk about how I run a game, Farscape is how. If you leave the other side of a Don’t Rest Your Head game panting and frantic and exhausted and satisfied, it’s because I wrote that game to feel like I GM it, and I GM games so they feel like Farscape did.

Anyway.

The entire flippin’ series is on sale at Amazon right now for less than $60, which is about 40% of the regular price. You should maybe really urgently buy it, or get it for someone this Christmas.

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

I started reading Cheri Priest’s Boneshaker recently.  About 8 or so chapters in, I had to admit it has a well detailed steampunk world, nicely grimy, and focused on an interesting tale of parents and children. But I just wasn’t gripped by it, so for the moment it’s been put aside on my “promising, but I’ll work on it later” pile.  Good stuff, well done, yes, but not grabby.

I’ve been tweeting back and forth with Brad Murray about many things (the Fate game Diaspora that he and three other gents worked on being a big part of it), one of which is our mutual admiration of Vernor Vinge’s novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness In The Sky.  I am not a hard sci fi sort of guy when it comes down to it, but Vinge’s novels really grabbed me. Yes, there’s bits of science and intriguing speculation flying fast and furious at your face, but he also has a master’s touch in pacing and character.

It’s been a while since I read those books, but their fingerprints were all over Diaspora.  So Brad pointed me toward Vinge’s earlier work, Marooned in Realtime.  I saw that The Peace War was essentially a prequel story to Marooned, so I picked up both and got to reading War.

Vinge owned me all over again.  I’m prone to the occasional mild bout of insomnia, but that wasn’t the case while I was reading The Peace War.  I came to bed dog tired and ready to sleep.  Then I’d pick up the damn book, and I’d be up past three A.M.  While not all of Vinge’s work grabs me this hard (I’ve never managed to get into Rainbows End, but I might give it another try later), those failures to grab are the exception.

The Peace War was written before the end of the Cold War, so it has some “future history” anachronisms in it based around that, and they just do not matter.  It’s a solid thriller with a future Earth that’s been irrevocably changed by a bit of technological blackmail and the regrets of the guy who made the technology possible.  I’d summarize more, but Vinge’s ideas are the sort that are difficult to describe without spoiling some of the essentials.  Highly recommended.

I’m starting into Marooned now, and I’m at that crucial 8 chapter mark. No chance of this going on the Later Pile, though — I’ve been staying up past three again.  The grab is in the characters, at the end of the day: I care about the characters first, and get lulled into the exploration of the hard(ish) sci fi ideas afterwards.  Which is really the way it should be: give me a great story about interesting people first, and explore ideas second.

Which has me thinking about Shock: and Diaspora both, and how my preferences relate to ‘em, but that’s a post for another time.

A cool music video inspired by the Little Prince. HEARTSREVOLUTION - 薔薇と彼女の王子 (The Rose And Her Prince)

It's a little Pilgrimage in 2 minutes. :)

Hey, so apparently one of the central elements of gameplay in Do is already an old improv game! Check it out.

"Fortunately, Unfortunately" Improvisation Exercises -- powered by eHow.com

The example story is a bit mundane, but add two or three more people and Do's rather gonzo setting and you can see how you can quickly create some zany shenanigans.

You can watch Young and Restless in China for free, and you really really should.

A four-year documentary following the lives of 9 twentysomethings and a couple thirtysomethings in China. Wildly different stories and problems, but all reflective of the rapidly changing nature of Chinese society.

• A migrant worker from the countryside who wants to marry for love, despite her family's traditional values.
• An ecological lawyer representing the poor in lawsuits against government-owned companies facing literal Olympian deadlines.
• A woman whose mother was kidnapped 18 years ago is on a quest to bring her back home.
• A rapper trying to find love and success in his music career.
• An entrepreneur who starts with fabric scraps in his mom's bedroom and a year later has a full-on internet tailor business.

There are many more stories, too. All of them frequently deal with the issues of ecology vs. business, corruption vs. idealism, family vs. career, traditional pragmatism vs. modern expectations. It's amazing stuff.

I only add the Do tag because any one of these stories would make an amazing Do letter. I've mentioned before that news stories are an ever-present source of inspiration for letters and this documentary is no exception. Take problem X from the news, present to your friends and ask "How would you solve this problem?" That's something I'll write more about in the book itself.

Perhaps it might even be a way for parents to address current events with their kids? Hm. I dunno if the system quite supports that, but it's a thought.

In the mean time, I can't recommend this documentary enough. I nearly cried during the story about the woman looking for her mother and I couldn't help but laugh at the rapper's macho posturing. :P

I leave you with this fun fact: Most of the people featured in the documentary broke into English as often as Firefly characters break into Chinese. :)