Weekly Update - 335 - 8/10/26 (Patreon)

Welp.

Friday: God Slayers - 256

Last chance to vote in the votey thing!

The overwhelming support in favor of COLORED TTRPG art came as a surprise. Honestly. Not because I thought anyone prefers monochrome over color, obviously you all like color. Of all the areas I still have to improve upon, I do think color is one of my stronger... uh... proclivities. But for something like a TTRPG manual I figured it made more sense to make it monochrome because A. I could probably produce a lot more art faster, (that's why I called the polls the TTRPG lightning round, cuz like... I wanted to go faster) and B. it would vastly lower the cost of printing physical manuals, should that ever be a thing we wanna do some day in the future.

Unfortunately it isn't quite so simple to simply shift an image from color to black and white or back again... monochrome is an art form all on its own, with tone and shadows and contrast being key to the clarity of the image, and color... doesn't always translate as cleanly because when we see bright greens and bright purples and bright cyans, a lot of those can all shift into just similar shades of light greys, causing the image to lose a ton of detail if care isn't taken to shift them properly. Color adds a whole other dimension of complexity to art.

Included in the previews is a version of the intro art where I simply removed the layer that makes it all greyscale, and on the surface yeah, I did use SOME color to produce the image but if you look closely, you'll see why it's just not... very pretty. I didn't create it with color in mind. Fixing it for color would take a lot of extra work. (tho I may want to do that anyway because it could be a nice cover image if I do.) And honestly I AM curious to learn how to draw better in monochrome, because I'm wondering if establishing a better foundation there would help me understand art better in general.

But where I'm sitting right now... I'm suddenly kind of unsure how to proceed. I've heard you loud and clear. The people have spoken. So... I could MAYBE produce full color, fully rendered arts for the digital version of the TTRPG, but probably a lot less of them. Cuz I do want the thing to actually like... be done at some point. It's currently sitting at 14 Chapters, which is probably where it's gonna stay, and I was thinking of doing about one decently big art per chapter, plus one art per species template, plus a few for equipment... a few of the monsters definitely need some (Xane's species is a particular highlight) plus some smaller ones here and there just to try and break up the text walls. I may yet be overly ambitious in that... after all... there's still just one of me.

But given ALL that there is to do, and given that I was dissatisfied stealing some of my old art from the comic to use for the TTRPG, I sorta feel like drawing all fresh stuff for it. And that takes... time. Plus I still wanna put out comics basically every week, cuz the main thing is still the main thing. Plus I still gotta edit the whole manual. Ooof, but yeah, one thing at a time.

So I could also do just a few big colored pieces for the digital manual, adjust them for monochrome so I have that in case of print (more work)... and do the smaller arts in mono to preserve my own time and sanity.

Maybe in future polls I'll have you guys vote on which arts I should color. Do the B+W ones in the spare time.

Oh, and for the record this actually isn't technically my FIRST TTRPG. I worked on the Triten Gaming System 1e a while back, which was Fenris Publishing's flagship product. This is just the first TTRPG I'm finally doing 100% by myself, using all my own ideas and for my own universe.