Community

Change of plans.

The idea of the chopper isn't going to pan out. Time and money constraints are slowing me down enough that I just can't make enough progress to justify a blog.

Since I spent 4 hours of my life watching Julie/Julia on the plane while traveling to and from IlluxCon (read more about that experience on ArtOrder). While I'll never get those 4 hours back - they did make me think about this blog. The art directors for D&D get to work with hundreds of talented artists every year. Recently in one of team meetings we were looking over a pile of art that we are considering submitting for the Spectrum 17 competition, and someone made the comment that we should do a "year of..." art book. One that showcased all the artists we used in D&D for the year. Now I know that art books have traditionally not done real well for us in the retail stores - so while I'll try to sell the brand team on the idea, I thought I could start addressing the idea here...

Welcome to a year of Dungeons & Dragons artists...

So I've been mulling what to do on my Wizards Community blog for some time now. Since I expend a lot of energy writing and maintaining my ArtOrder blog, I didn't want to do the same thing...in a different spot. That would just be silly.

Folks that know me, know that I have a passion for art, and motorcycles
. I always love it when I can mix the two. Recently I gotten the itch to tear into a new project (like I have the time for that!!), and with some encouragement from my lovely wife, I've decided to pull all the parts and pieces out of my barn and start building a new chopper.

I think I should blame this sudden renewed building itch on Dale Lawrence, who brought his bike to GenCon this past summer. I featured him on ArtOrder a few weeks ago - see more here.

On top of that, I had a lot of fun with one of the challenges on ArtOrder, where folks were asked to dream up some D&D inspired bikers, and their motorcycles. You can see the line-up here.

With all that inspiration, how could I pass up the opportunity to put together a new skoot? Maybe I can even talk the brand folks into "sponsoring" the bike and letting me do a D&D theme on it.

So let the fun begin. I'll try and do some weekly posts to kep you up on the journey.

The PAX seminar went well this past weekend, and I'm hoping that I will receive a copy of the round table soon so I can post it for all to hear. I was really surprised at the turnout. I was worried that we'd have more folks on the panel thanin the audience, but it turns out over 100 (I heard counts as high as 175) folks decided to risk attendance. Thanks eveyone that showed up!

That leads to the next thought on my mind. A question came up about portfolio reviews,  we had a postmortem on the con season yesterday, and I got a question about portfolio reviews from an artists a while back - the combination of all those things had my brain ticking last night. And since I was having problems with my home computer and was unable to finish my judging of the latest ArtOrder challenge, I decided to take on the concept that the portfolio process at cons might just be broken. In fact I'm quite convinced that it is flawed to no end...but that is just my opinion. Read about my thoughts and chime up with your own thoughts and opinions at todays ArtOrder post
.

PAX

I don't know if you caught it yesterday on ArtOrder, but I was pimping PAX a bit. Well, to be truthful, I was pimping the fact that Dawn Murin, Jeremy Jarvis and Mari Kolkowsky, and I will be doing a seminar at PAX. Due to the brilliant idea, from several folks, I'm trying to see if we can get the session recorded and released as a podcast. I don't know if I'll be able to pull that off this round, but it did make me think about all the other cons and functions we art directors are involved in, and made me set that as a priority for future events. I'll have to talk with Patrick about what we can do for IlluxCon.... In case you are in the Seattle area and attending PAX, swing on by the seminar and say "Hi".

Read all about it and see what else is on the schedule on their website.