New illustrations

One of the goals of Games for an Ordinary Life, the micro roleplaying game zine I kickstarted in February as part of Zinequest was to help me create some more linoleum block print work. After the campaign, other parts of life took over for a while – hence the radio silence over here – but I finally buckled down and drafted out four illustrations. I want to share them with you!

I have a pretty intensive drafting process that starts with very loose sketches, chasing concepts, then turning a multitude of sketchs and imaginations into thumbnails to find layouts and forms that I like. I draw by hand and I make extensive use of tracing paper to iterate and try new ideas while keeping existing structures and details I like.

It's a technique I developed well over a decade ago as a blacksmith – I always found it easier to imagine the physical structure I would build with my hands if I drew the joinery and details. Somehow it's the same with the pen to cutting knife for linoleum. It's a fully analog process.

I've done digital painting but I'm not as fluent with it. Anyway, it's good to get away from the screen and get the physical feedback, the direct eye-hand coordination, the constant slipping of paper and smudging of ink, the intoxicating aroma of a heavily sharpied paper...

Here's the images! Delightfully, they somehow lined up nicely with elemental themes. Eventually I'll share the cutting and printing process with you.

As always, thanks for reading along. I would like to write more frequent articles – I'm still quite busy, so we'll see how that goes moving forward.