longer reads
bigger ideas and more to look at
-
digital studies exercise
For the past year or so I’ve been hosting a monthly remote lifedrawing/other digital art exercise session with my team at work, and I wanted to share this one with y’all because I think it’s been a really important exercise for me over the years and my team really got a lot out of it […]
in art
Concept Art
professional vis dev work
-
Environment Design for Unannounced Solarpunk Game
Environment design exploring the possibility of using asset store models to populate the level without losing the worldbuilding and colour design. Created as a thorough guide for the level designer, including labelled assets and isolated…
in concept art
Comics
comics of many kinds
-
Hourly Comics Day 2024
very proud of these sketchy pencil crayon autobio comics! and an arm update for y’all as well:
in comics
photography
digital camera snaps and thoughts
-
Your Cellphone Camera’s Digital Processing Settings and You
I am mad about cellphone cameras hiding the processing they do to my photos, and I am glad about software I found that lets me control it and opt in and out.
in photo -
What Format You Might Want To Save Digital Photos In
What format do you recommend I save photographs in? Like raw or jpeg? I don’t know the difference.
in photo -
how i am doing accidental exposure therapy for my fear of bugs
So I’ve been taking photos of bugs, now that I can trust my phone to not chew up any macro or zoom photography I take, and sharing them onto iNaturalist. it scratches my look I…
in photo
Pocket Dungeons
system agnostic ttrpg modules that come in a cute pouch
-
The Ghost Houses of Phylinecra – Pocket Dungeon Zine & Pocket Pack
The Ghost Houses of Phylinecra is a system-agnostic, story-heavy dungeon crawl about a community recovering after disaster, and how a goddess might try to understand mortal grief. The village of Phylinecra was a tight-knit community of artists and creatives, until it suffered a devastating flood. In the aftermath, as the survivors try to salvage their […]
-
The Corruption of Pelursk – Pocket Dungeon Pack
The Corruption of Pelursk is a system-agnostic tabletop RPG hexcrawl/dungeon, written by Shel Kahn. The Isle of Pelursk holds a glowing, steaming, mist-shrouded secret at its heart, and once you’ve entered its clutches it does not want to let you leave. Designed to fit easily as a sidequest into an ongoing campaign or stand confidently…
-
Keep on the Shining Isle – Pocket Pack
Keep on the Shining Isle is a system-agnostic dungeon featuring a haunted ruin, a mystery cult and some very tempting apples. Pick this up to send your home campaign on a memorable sidequest, or try out your favourite new system with this 1-2 session scenario. Written and published by Shel Kahn as the first of many…
Teaching
professional vis dev work
-
What I’ve Learned About Teaching Art
I’ve had the privilege of teaching art in a variety of environments – from still life oil painting at the college level, to combining art with science and history in a museum setting, to guiding…
in teaching
Art
paintings and drawings and more
-
digital studies exercise
For the past year or so I’ve been hosting a monthly remote lifedrawing/other digital art exercise session with my team at work, and I wanted to share this one with y’all because I think it’s…
in art
news
what’s up at the portable city
-
LongStory 2!
So my day job at Bloom Digital has kept a lot of my life under NDA, and it’s a real treat to get to tell you about LongStory 2 and all the hard work we’ve been doing to make this game a reality! LongStory was originally created in 2014 as an alternative to shallow “insert…
personal blog
the shel news
short snippets
pinned thoughts and quick snapshots
-
Thermal print camera and ttrpg play!
Shoutout to curious quail for this wonderful example of where thermal printing is fun and cute and useful! enjoyed this? keep exploring:
-
Working on a painting on printmaking paper
This paper is not sized like watercolour paper and it’s sucking up all my paint! but I’m getting such soft and complex colours because of that… but I’ve lost a lot of my contrast and smaller highlights from the way the paper lets the paint spread into it like a sponge. So it’s definitely time…
-
impossible door watercolour
after one hell of a workweek, i took a few hours Friday night and listened to my favorite Opeth albums and painted a watercolour landscape in my favourite spooky palette. painted on 12 x 18″ coldpress Arches watercolour paper, something i have not always enjoyed working with due to the intense sizing. for this piece…
-
working on a tiny poemzine
as mentioned elsewhere, I’m not a huge fan of my handwriting right now, but it feels like it would be worthwhile to hand write this poem for my zine. I did a first pass and it’s all pretty rough, but I scanned it at a nice high resolution just in case I do use it.…
-
a few beautiful bugs and the phone lenses I used
Some of my fav macro shots from the summer. Love a sweat bee! I’ve been using cheap cellphone camera lens attachments to try out macro photography, and honestly it’s been incredibly fun! These are the two sets I got that have worked well for me – they’re kind of random to track down, Apexel is…
-
tiny gouache view
I was doing a sketch with this fountain pen, which has non-waterproof ink in it, and I decided to try washing over it with a water brush, and then painting over the tonal result with some gouache, which I haven’t done in a while. it ended up being a very enjoyable if very small painting!
-
oil pastel bird in the hand
painted on wood! I converted my reference photo to black and white, as well, and I think it did give me more permission to be weird with the color. you might not know this, but I kept pet birds from the age of 9 until I was almost 30, first a peach-faced lovebird named Pickles…
-
oil pastel oranges
reffing a lovely still life from unsplash, i believe. done on slate blue 9 x 12″ canson mi-tients paper. I’ve been doing a lot of underdrawing with the cray-pas expressionist pastels, which are a lot firmer, so they don’t layer that well with themselves but they behave really predictably underneath the rest of my pastels,…
-
Thermal printer tutorial:
This is a great short breakdown into getting prints out of your label printer! Hope this helps folks hack theirs while I keep testing the limits of mine. enjoyed this? keep exploring:
-
lovely new art toy!
a 27qhd cintiq! complete with pen, stand AND express key remote! seriously, I’ve already discovered how useful the remote is, it saved me yesterday during hours of setting up tiny assets in unity. it’s enormously more ergonomic for my partially paralyzed right hand than a keyboard right now and i wish I’d thought to try…