The United States Postal Service delivered a special surprise for me today: three copies of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying book. I’m excited to have seven spot illustrations inside.

These are among my first illustrations for a published roleplaying game, and it feels pretty good to see ‘em printed.

You can see more of them in my portfolio. They’re on my “Eric M. Smith, Illustrator” Facebook page, too. I promise that very soon I’ll have lots of new illustrations up in both places. Just waiting for the books to be published.

Something I have been meaning to do for awhile was to sit down and try to learn Google SketchUp. I was intimidated by it, having had some headaches and frustration with various other 3D programs, like Blender, 3DS and Maya. After working through the video tutorials, I found out that SketchUp is nowhere near as complicated, and is actually very fun to use. SketchUp is not a scary spider and will not throw me in the basement.

Here’s a couple of views of my first try, a fighter or maybe scout-class spaceship with varying degrees of detail.

A Little Spaceship

It took me a couple of hours to model this, but I think I could do it in half that now. Seriously, the tools in SketchUp make it that easy and fast.

Pew-Pew Vroom!

I’m working on a science fiction project right now and I intend to build some ships of various sizes, as well as a funky spaceport, to help with drawing various angles in perspective.

Update 06/27/08: Since this post, two companies have written to me about mentioning their Google SketchUp plugin or other product. I don’t mind at all, but it’s interesting that I’m getting this kind of response to one small post about SketchUp. Is there that little buzz about SketchUp right now that even the humble Glimbit blog gets some attention, or are these two different companies just actively and aggressively marketing their products anywhere and everywhere SketchUp is mentioned?

At any rate, I don’t intend to post much about SketchUp, but if I try out those plugins, I’ll post my thoughts.

One of my favorite gaming illustrators spoke at the Eric Carle Picture Book Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts today. Tony DiTerlizzi (site blog) has worked on numerous games throughout his career, such as Magic the Gathering, the Planescape Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting material and White Wolf’s Changeling game. He’s on to books now and has received kudos in the picture book field for The Spider and the Fly, among others.

Besides talking about his childhood love of DnD and Star Wars and the influence they had on his artwork, Tony talked about a childhood book he created. It was a 75-page field guide of mythical monsters, some from folklore and some from his own imagination.

Many years later, after years of illustrating their game books, he tried to pitch the idea of a monster field guide to the makers of DnD, but they passed.

In time, he found great success with his picture books. After The Spider and the Fly won awards, his editor asked him an open-ended question, “what book would you like to do next? You can do anything you’d like.”

Again he returned to the idea of the Field Guide as written by Arthur Spiderwick on several adventurous expeditions, with tips about how to handle various monsters. The editor liked the story, maybe even more than the field guide idea, and told him to work it out. That’s when the Spiderwick chronicles were born!

He worked with Holly Black to create the chapter books. He said he wanted to fill the books with illustrations because, as a visual kid, when he turned 10 years old, he stopped reading books and switched to comics. He just couldn’t get into the words-only style! When do we stop appreciating illustrated books? I don’t think we do, we’re just tricked into not expecting them.

He showed us a piece from a new project he’s working on called “Kenny and the Dragon,” a retelling of “The Reluctant Dragon,” with a rabbit as a protagonist.

The exhibit featured photographs and maquettes from the upcoming Spiderwick movie and best of all, lots of original paintings and inks from Tony. His ink and watercolor pieces were lively … you know the energy you get from your original sketches sometimes? He keeps that energy throughout the piece.

He mentioned Arthur Rackham, an illustrator from the early 1900s as an inspiration to his artwork for the series as well as the design and typography of old books from the period.

His gouache on bristol paintings were the real draw for me. The field guide pieces showed a deft and subtle handling of color with beautiful neutrals and hints of bright colors throughout. The Seeing Stone cover piece was really amazing, showing his ability to really push a brush around a piece of board.

Steve’s at it again with his sweet instructional video series “Coloring Comics the Steve Hamaker Way.” This time we find Steve demonstrating the use of the Alt/Option key to speed up selecting colors while painting. Why don’t you stop by Steve’s Blog and have a look-see? You should see episode 1, too.

It’s great to watch his work process up-close. I always wonder how the pros do it, what sneaky tricks they use to be more efficient. I hope he talks about his brushes next! Or, how he shoots color out of his eye socket!

This Week’s Illustration Friday theme: Buzz
This was a 14″ X 17″ pencil sketch noodled on soon-shredded paper. I inked the drawing on bristol with a brush pen . I scanned and assembled it in Photoshop. Added a layer of textured ground and painted it using a textured brush named “Splatter.” It’s the first time I’ve used such a Photoshop brush, (I was recently inspired by a John K post on Art Lozzi’s Flintstones backgrounds, to try some more random, splotchy brushwork,) and I found it pleasing, but I need to work on it.

I’d love to hear what you think and what I could do to improve this type of illustration.

What’s This About?

This one is about work. Throughout the day, as a worker bee sits in his worn office chair that squeaks when his leg bounces, driving his neighbor, a forty-something year-old corporate veteran, into quick fits of rage soon quelled by the conditioning of proper organizational citizenship behavior, he sees yellow. It’s in the brown cube walls, the warm gray cinder blocks of the walls and the tops of the desks. All paper is yellow. His teeth … yellower.

The veteran’s sticky note, the one that she stuck to his monitor when he was getting more coffee, the one that reads “Pls stop squeaking. Thks!” is, well, you know. It, too, is yellow.

In the honeycomb of these office cubicles, yellow is just a nice way of being brown. That’s not the brown that nicely compliments a cool color with subtle shades. It’s the Brown that makes you forget the cool, the warm and everything else. This Brown makes the most of its allotted seven-point-seven-five hours, pushing the other colors into its puddles like a bully and convincing you that it’s the only color left.

After a few years, Brown conditions the worker bees to accept the following tenets:

• I will say “sounds good” even when it doesn’t make sense.
• I will focus on being present in my cube at 8:30 AM and 5:00 PM. From 10 AM to 2 PM, all bets are off.
• A contrary opinion is negative buzz, so I will agree with the Queen unquestioningly and do as I’m ordered.

What the bees need is a nice gust of wind, a bear, something other than a brown bear, preferably, or a nice plump bird landing on the branch to shake up the beehive and get the bees all riled up. No, a new, colorful poster for the walls is not the answer as it would soon turn yellow. Sixty-day notices might be a good start.

I worked on a painting sketch tonight and failed miserably. I wanted it to be John Singer Sargent but instead it was Souvenir Gift Shop.I overused some Painter tricks and it looked pretty fakey. Worse, I made some significant drawing errors on Gramps, especially his eyes and mouth. You kind of have to get those right when you’re doing a portrait.

I should have slowed down and fixed the drawing, but I was anxious to get into the painting part. I’ve been looking at books on some favorite painters who make it look easy.

Okay, here are the thumbnails. Sketch, “painting” and photo.

Nothing to see here, sorry. Gramps, being 83 years young, deserves a better portrait. I’ll get a photo and try to do it up right. (Painting from life would be cool, but I don’t think I’ll get him to sit still that long.)

Imagine Buffaloaf here dancing to the theme song to Benny Hill. It’s a really slow, bouncy dance, and his arms don’t drop the whole time. He just hops from foot to foot, really. Occasionally, he spins and shakes his tail back and forth. Kevin James comes to mind.

I want to try to make my drawings look like they have weight, like they take up space. If you have some feedback about this, lemme know.

In the room of project ideas in my head, the cartooning-bug, once dried-up and dead in the corner of the ceiling, has become juicy again, glowing, and has swooped down and bit me. SPACE started it, after meeting people like Matt Hawkins. He draws “Cowboy Clyde and the Pirates,” my favorite find at SPACE. He had me laughing out-loud a lot. I recommend it, especially if you find yourself working a job that you really don’t like but need to keep to pay the bills. Also described as a “G.O.O.D.” job, (get out of debt.)

I’m glad I finished my little Emet and Jhomm stories. I’ll probably come back to them. But the cartoony stories and characters are easier to think up right now. Guys like Buffaloaf, Figgle and Gweeb seem to really live and talk and over-eat and make uncertain noises. I hope to finish off a nice-sized graphic novel some day, and I think the first one will be made up of short stories featuring cartoon characters. (It’s important to make your goals specific. I also hope to travel somewhere someday, and to learn more about something.)