Make-it Monday: Drawing, Splash!

Digging through my old sketchbooks has awoken the drawing bug in me. This past weekend, I sketched up this little seaside landscape. Perhaps there are treasures washed up among the rocks, or a lonely spirit who gazes out from the clifftop on a new moon.

New Scanner! Old Drawings Made New

Got home today to find a shiny new scanner waiting for me! I got it set up and pulled out one of my old sketchbooks to test it out. Here is a sampling of some of my rough uploads. I just rotated and cropped these, but plan to tweak their lighting curves in Photoshop at a later date. These are all from a sketchbook I kept back in 1999.

Having confirmed that the new scanner works, I am all set to start mapping for April A to Z!

Make-it Monday: Map, Fallside House Interior

Forgive the late posting on this one. The Fiancee and I headed down to McMenamin's Edgefield in Troutdale, Oregon this weekend to celebrate a friend's birthday. On Saturday, we took a trip toodling along the Columbia River gorge and made a stop at Multnomah Falls.

As my brain is wont to do, it immediately began to imagine the Multinomah visitor center as something other than a roadside tourist trap. What if the visitor center was actually a roadside stop along some trade route? It makes sense that travel back in the day would be governed by a couple of related factors. 1.) The distance someone could travel in a day 2.) The presence / location of survival resources and 3.) The presence of navigation landmarks. Multnomah falls reimagined could easily fit one or all of these requirements for a regular rest stop along an overland trade route.

I imagine the fictional house at Fallside arose as traffic expanded a common camp site into something more permanent. The house served as a place to rest, share news and conduct a little business. Perhaps local woodsmen sold game to resupply merchant caravans with meat or foraged goods. Woodcutters might do the same with firewood. Perhaps the builders of the house set up a cave in the cliff near the falls for aging local brews. If the house was located at one end of a particularly difficult stretch of road, such as a mountain pass, it could also act as a place to pick up expert guides or hired muscle.

I actually have a couple other map ideas for Fallside, including an exterior map of the surroundings and one for the cellars beneath the house. Those, however, will have to wait for another Monday.

Sketches of Yore

I used to be quite the prolific drawer in my youth. This kind, not that kind. Recently, I pulled a load of my old stuff out of storage, and uncovered a plethora of sketches drawn up during my childhood. Flipping through the sheaves of artwork brought back quite a few memories. It also provided adult me with a wonderful glimpse into the mind that was young me. Poring over the fruits of my creative impulses, now protected from the hormonal mire that was my adolescent brain by an irreversible temporal buffer, I was able to analyze the works with a more objective, dare I say wiser, eye.

I drew a number of conclusions while sifting through the ephemera of my past:

• I was a weird kid in quite an amusing sort of way.
• Stuff that I thought was super awesome at the time often did not hold up to later scrutiny.
• I was politically opinionated in a way that only unfiltered, too-smart kids can be: driven by a desire to seem edgy or at least not dull, but which in practice comes across as reactionary.
• I had a real emo streak before "emo" was a word. Lots of pictures of moody teens, half-drawn faces, single eyes and leafless trees.

I have wanted to scan my earlier scribblings into a digital format for some time now. After this most recent perusal, I finally began that process. I think I will share a selection of them here, along with the stories... when they exist behind just what the heck I was thinking.

Portrait of the artist at work

I actually have several drawings related to unorthodox systems for spaceflight