Tech, Computers, Dungeons, and Drawings!
In the lands of Wundleich, the adventurers Kadmos and Yum pursue fantastical tales of treasure and mystery, slowly unearthing ancient secrets and forgotten lore that could see their world remade…
These characters are played by close friends, who asked that I draw them as part of their ongoing Dungeons and Dragons campaign.
Over the course of the summer of 2019, I was lucky enough to be able to teach at the Stem Kids NYC Summer camp. For four weeks between January and August, I taught programming to kids ages 6-13. During lunch breaks, I started a game of Dungeons and Dragons for a group of the kids. The kids decided to name their group “Python” (spelled using the Greek letter) in reference to the programming language I used in my lessons. As both a teacher and tabletop gaming enthusiast, it was amazing for me to see how much fun they all had during the games.
Once upon a time, Aaaron Amnotxy was the promising heir to the noble House Antaniel, they of the Silver Word. Such a bright child, the scribes would say, such promise as with the pen or bow. The sages of the Trials, for all his promise, found him wanting. For the dishonor, the stain of failure upon the name of the House, his father the Lord Antaniel says he is to leave. What realm is there beyond the wood for an elf without a name?
I have played the character of Aaaron in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign for the past year – this is a pencil and paper sketch of a scene from his backstory – of the moment he left the elven woods, and left the signet ring of his house behind.
Over the summer of 2019, I was lucky enough to be able to work on a short play written by one of my friends from school, and produced as part of the New York Theatre Festival’s Summerfest series. My role was an aglomeration of sound designer, composer, and sound operator along with lighting designer, stage manager and lighting operator . The show was a short Lovecraftian horror thriller set aboard a stranded antarctic expedition in the early 20th Century.
I created poster art, a musical theme, and sound effects for the production. The show opened with a slightly shortened variant of the theme over which played a narration done by the chair of our school’s theatre department, which is playable from the link below. Although running sound and lighting during a show can be incredibly stressful, this was without a doubt one of the most fun and rewarding collaborative projects I’ve been part of.
As may have been indicated by some of the posts I’ve made already, I am something of a fan of drawing. Concept art, designs, and characters are among my favorite subject material. The nature of the things uploaded in my earlier posts may also have indicated that digital sketching is among the methods I employ.
For my digital art I employ a Kamvas pro 13 graphics tablet from the Huion company. It comes in a big black box, and while undeniably pricey, is far more economical than similar products by Wacom, the giant in digital art hardware.
Once removed from the aforementioned big, black box, the tablet reveals itself to be a screen slightly narrower and longer than a piece of printer paper. It comes with a stylus for drawing with. One of the great selling points of this model of tablet is that the pen requires no battery or charge; you can use it forever as long as the tablet is plugged in. Besides its screen, the tablet also has a total of five buttons and a slider (plus two more buttons on the stylus) which can be mapped to any key combination on your keyboard. For example, one of the buttons on my tablet functions as Control-z, handy for rapidly undoing mistakes, and my stylus can toggle between pen and eraser mode quite easily. The tablet’s screen is indeed a screen, and can be configured just like a second monitor. The tablet itself requires connection to a USB port to register as an input device, a HDMI port to render, and a power supply. All of that fits into the single cable visible on the right of the tablet in the photo,
Once you plug in the tablet, however, you’re still not quite done. See, the tablet registers on your computer as a USB input device and displays exactly like it should, but your computer doesn’t really know how to talk to the tablet. If you try doing anything like using that pressure sensitivity it just wont work. For this, you need to download the company’s driver. A driver is just a special piece of software that you use to talk to hardware. Your computer comes with a lot of drivers built into its operating system, which is why you don’t need to specially configure your mouse or keyboard when you set them up. Your computer knows how to handle a HDMI display (hence why the tablet’s display works just fine), but your computer probably has no clue how to handle the pressure input by itself, since it assumes that your stylus is just like a mouse pointer. This is where the Huion tablet graphics diver comes in. This driver is made by the company, and lets your computer talk to the tablet properly. This app window lets you set up your hotkeys, configure the display, select how the contact on the tablet screen maps to the display, and to calibrate the pen input (configuring how the tablet’s display is treated as a monitor is done through your computer’s normal settings window). Once this is set up, you can start drawing.
Now, your tablet and driver may be fancy, but they’re not an art setup by themselves, because they can’t actually, well, do art. All of this so far has been setting things up so you can input brush strokes into your computer. To actually get drawing, you need a special art program. For this there are many great options such as Photoshop, but also a huge number of free and open-source online projects by various groups. GIMP is one popular example. For my art, I use a program called Krita, which besides a simple and easily to use interface has some spectacular brush templates and a great color selection dialogue. However, most tablets will work with most art software, albeit with varying amounts of setup required. Krita is great because it detects your tablet automatically.
And that’s about it! Once you’ve set it all up, then the world of art is your oyster. Cheers, and happy drawing!
As a huge fan of Dungeons and Dragons, I love to have miniature figures for my character. I also love playing tinker and inventor characters, and so when I saw the latest version of the artificer class on Unearthed Arcana (the pdf is on Unearthed Arcana, linked here) I was… excited.
Now, for some context, I’m part of a massive high-school spanning Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) game with my friends, and my character has bounced around a little bit in terms of his class. I was looking for a fun and interesting set of game mechanics, and boy does the artificer have those in spades. So, I took the artificer, choosing the artillerist subclass as the logical choice for someone just coming off of a gunslinger. The big selling point of the artillerist was the ability to build specialized turrets, which participate in combat (These mechanics have been changed in the official release).
A while ago, I bought a miniature figure of my character from the site HeroForge, which I use to mark the location of my character on the battlefield whenever our party engages in combat. Amidst the general excitement about the awesomeness of the new class and the anticipation of our first session in more than a month, an idea came to me – use Tinkercad to make custom miniatures of the turrets I would be placing which I could use alongside my character’s miniature in combat. And so the adventure began.
The first step was to design the miniatures in Tinkercad. To this end, I enlisted the aid of my friend Jawon Lee to come up with interesting concepts for a few of the turrets. The artificer artillerist subclass specifies three types of turrets: Flamethrowers, Force Ballistas, and Defense Turrets. We set to work on concepts, and eventually finished the models you see here. (You can see and download them here)(Jawon completely modeled the turrets on the left and right of the back row, the rest were mine; the little scopes visible on most of the turrets were his idea as well). After a few days of work, we were ready to print.
Now, you may have noticed that the model pictured above has an awful lot of overhangs and hollow areas, normally anathema to most consumer 3d Printers. Fortunately, my school recently acquired a new model of printer which can print both solid, normal plastic and special dissoluble plastic that it uses for supports. Simply placing the model in water (as pictured above) dissolves away the supports, leaving just the original model. Since the materials don’t mix or bond during printing, the resulting edges and overhangs are perfectly smooth. Fun fact – the supports absorb water as they dissolve, so they hang out as a sort of goop for a while before completely washing away; if you’ve ever handled a hagfish, imagine that stuff sorta clinging to the model. Its super cool (and no, I’m not a weirdo, goop is fun and all of you who think this sounds gross need to go and find a hagfish).
After about twelve hours of soaking, the minis came out just about perfectly! because of the small scale, the fine details like the sloped top of the ballista and the tip of the flamethrower barrel came out a bit rough, but in all other ways it was about as cool as can be imagined!
Cheers, and may the dice roll ever in your favor.