Pickle It

Don’t Starve recently released official mod tools and support. My friend Nick and I both really like the game and he and his wife had an idea for a mod so we took a crack at it. It adds a few new vegetables to the game as well as the ability to pickle food to extend its shelf life. I had to figure out how to blend the new art in with the game but I’ve got it down pretty well now and will likely go back and rework the first set of assets I made to look a little better. We uploaded the mod to the Steam Workshop and it’s doing pretty well. It currently has over 10,000 subscribers and is included in 39 mod collections.

 

Wiz-War Redesign

Wiz-War is a great table top game from the late 80′s, but the art has always been pretty terrible. Fantasy Flight finally re-released Wiz-War in 2012, but I had already started to completely revamp all of the art assets as a personal project. Here you can find the rules and cards and download my complete redesign art file. Below is a sampling of the updated art.

 

Closson 2012

From November of 2011 until March 2012 I was a candidate in the Democratic Primary for U.S. Congress in New Mexico’s 3rd Congressional District. Closson2012 is still up so you can see how it went down if you’re so inclined. Highlights include a newspaper article about SOPA and an endorsement from Oderus Urungus. During the course of the campaign I created a healthy chunk of art to support it. The most labor intensive being the 3 advertisements I animated to drum up online support, embeded below.

 

Aside from the ads I also designed a screen printed campaign poster, bumper stickers, buttons, etc.

 

Pythia

Tenacious D’s music video for Wonderboy inspired me to learn how to play mandolin (being the closest thing to a modern lute). There are only one or two mass produced electric mandolins and I wasn’t super keen on them. Eventually, I ran across Pete Mallison’s website Almuse, and it was exactly what I had been looking for.

I emailed him about what he had in stock but he had another idea. He wanted to make a mandolin version of Kirk Hammett’s Ouija guitar, but after seeing the artwork on my armour offered to do a Sean Closson signature mandolin and for an absurdly reasonable price. All I needed to do was come up with something to put on it.

I decided to illustrate the mythological rock off between Apollo and the satyr Marsyas being judged by the muses. I chose the color scheme to mimic ancient Greek black-figure pottery. The body was based on the B.C. Rich Stealth, Chuck Schuldiner’s signature guitar. Pythia refers to the Oracle of Delphi, who received prophecies from Apollo, and so felt like a fitting for this instrument. I’m really pleased with the way it came out and used it to record all of my campaign music.

 

Illustrated Armor

For the Illustration majors at Ringling, the entire last semester is dedicated to one final project. I knew since my first month at college that I was going to make a suit of armor for mine. My original idea was vastly more ambitious and would have required significantly more refined metal working skills than I possessed at the time, mainly due to thinking I could wing chasing and repousse. When it came time to fabricate it the limitations of both the tools I had available and the time I had to learn the new skills I needed proved challenging but ultimately led me to some creative solutions.

The illustrations on the armor itself were the actual focus, being an illustration major and all. In total I had 81 separate myths represented ranging from Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Native American, Japanese, Sumerian, Indian, some American folk tales, and even a handful of more modern symbols from movies and video games. Each piece of the armor had a theme that united the individual myths, characters, or symbols, and further related to the body part it protected i.e. wisdom on the helmet, valor on the right arm, and so forth.

For the fabrication of the actual armor itself, I didn’t trust most of the power tools or the oxy/acetylene torches the school had available. I ended up cutting the patterns out of 16 ga. mild steel sheets using a hand chisel and cold forging them into shape with a hammer and anvil, with some final clean up of the edges with an angle grinder. I wasn’t going to have time to get the armor in as polished a form as I would have liked, so I found some Rustoleum black automotive spray paint that had a weird built in hammered texture that went a long way toward masking the finish.

Once that was dry I used carbon transfer paper to transfer the drawings onto the individual pieces, and then colored them in with metallic paint pens from Home Depot. Once I had everything strapped and riveted it looked a lot better than I expected it to, and my instructor even admitted being pleasantly surprised. As a bonus just because I felt like doing it, I made a short animated music video to play next to my work at the thesis show.

I completed the whole experience by wearing the armour while seated in a throne that I managed to talk an antique store into loaning me. The owner thought I was a movie star. I brought a small barrel keg full of mead with me to the opening and drank it out of a silver (formerly, almost all of the silver was gone and I’m pretty sure what was left was lead. Not one of my best ideas.) goblet I found at a scrap yard while people perused the show.