I have two new 'things' that I'm working on artistically:

1. Meet my Inner Skeletor. For those of you familiar with Iron Maiden's character/mascot Eddie the Head, I was having a discussion with xtingu and the IJG's intrepid leader Andrew Durkin about said character. As Andy notes in one of his posts, we were thinking that it might be entirely amusing to create a ghoulish character mascot of the band. I'm going to let you just mull that one over. Updates coming in the near future.

2. Randomization and art. So I was sitting in a Borders book store tonight. Yes, I normally am a Barnes and Noble kind of guy, but I felt like 'mixing it up' a bit. Don't try to stop me - I'm a madman like that. Anyway - I was thinking about fantasy art and looking through the latest batch of "World's Greatest" magazines which promote the better fantasy artists and illustrators. It's been said that art is the creation of something with the intent to illicit an emotional response. I kinda like that summary about as much as any other, so I'm always looking to see what kind of emotional response the artist is looking to pull from me. As I was doing this, I noticed that a number of the artists in these magazines were using a tool I hadn't realized they were using before.

Symbols. Okay, sure - I knew that other artists use symbols all the time, but I had really thought about it in this light before. Namely, the artists were using archetypes to garner certain emotional responses to the image. Robots, dragons, faeries - people who would be looking at these images have a certain emotional investment in these standards. The artists in these magazines are using that investment to gain the emotional response that they're looking for.

This got me to thinking.

About a million and one years ago, I discovered the website www.Mythosa.net. For those of you who do now, or did at one time, do the RPG thing, Bruce Gulke (as creator of the website) has created one of the best, most fleshed out, and all round 'slickest' campaign worlds online that I have come across. While most of you may not know this, that's saying a lot. Campaign paroozing is a hobby of mine. Anyway - that's not all Bruce does. He's created a program called the Tablesmith.

The short version of the answer to "What is Tablesmith?" is this: It's the architecture needed to randomly generate responses based on data in tables created by the user. Or randomizer+database=fun. It's designed for gamers, but I've always thought that the Tablesmith had a broad spectrum of uses outside of direct RPG stuff. Writers, developers, game designers - the list could go on for quite a while. It's not focussed on fantasy or sci-fi or anything else really. Bruce designed it in a way that is usable by all of the above and more. If it seems like I'm going on because I'm impressed it's because I am.

Anyway, tonight, while sitting in said cafe I was thinking to myself: wouldn't it be a fun sort of 'game' to use Tablesmith to generate random subjects? I could create tables to generate the topic that any number of images would focus on.

While I just don't have the kind of background (or brains) to create something like deeptape's SandCastle Project, this seemed like a good way for me to mix technology with art. I've created a ridiculously simple version of the table already, but I will post more when I refine it.

I was thinking about doing some t-shirt designs. Mostly, I'm probably going to stick with my forte - tribal designs and the like. However, I have some pretty damn clever friends, so I thought that I would put the word out:

If any of you have an idea for a funny (or serious for that matter) shirt - let me know. If I like the idea, and I put it on a shirt, I'll (at least) buy one of the shirts for you, and you can brag to all of your friends that you came up with the idea!

... I present 20 minutes of timed sketchwork