I have spent the last several months, creating a children’s book… but not just *any* children’s book, but a book which helps teach deaf and hard of hearing kids American Sign Language!

In addition to illustrating and coding the entire book myself, I have also prepared a little micro-site to help promote it, and that web design happens to be my week 29 project:

Click here to visit the site for yourself!

The book itself is available exclusively for the ipad from the iBookstore, and half of the proceeds are being donated to the Canadian Hearing Society to help promote and fund education for deaf and hard of hearing children.

D is for Dinosaur – Chris Baginski

This is quite possibly the most important thing I have ever created, so please tell every child, teacher and parent you know about it.

Have faith that I will indeed be posting week 29 as soon as I am able to!

Cbag out!

During the lengthy break I had after the magnificent beating I took in the first round of last weeks Orion’s Cup tournament, I had ample time to look over the new Cassino sourcebook for Flames of War.

The inside back cover is this beautiful 3-page roll-fold aerial view painting of Cassino. As always, I marveled at how good something can look when the individual brush strokes are actually quite crude. Painting is all about illusion and suggestion, afterall. I really think that is something I need to adapt into my paintings – I tend to fuss over minute details all the time.

brrrrrrrr

The original for this painting is 20×16, at 300dpi… and yet, it only took me about 40 minutes to complete, start to finish, including sourcing reference material! I’m starting to get the hang of this speed painting stuff.

That’s it for me for this week… but, if all goes according to plan, there’s going be some huge coming out of the Cbaggery in the next few days. Stay tuned.

Cbag out!

You might recall the Dark Angel Mosaic I did several weeks ago. For the text on the scroll I actually created an entire font!

Some of the letters were inspired by various hand-drawn lettering I found in some older Warhammer 40K publications, but most of the letterforms have never appeared anywhere before!

That’s a short one this week – time to get back to designing websites for Mexican restaurants.

Cbag out!

The client loved the card faces so much, they they asked me to do the card backs as well!

I have been working on a really cool project, that must remain a secret… for now. So I havent been leaving myself without much time for this. I sat down at 2am to finish up some work, and was able to work on this week’s project at 3:15am… I told myself, ‘You have 1 hour to come up with something.’

So I decided to do a painting/poster, and 1 hour, 10 minutes later, this popped out:

I'm the gardener.

Danny Trejo’s icon stance at the end of the film reminded me alot of Frazetta’s painting for Conan the Adventurer, so I felt like doing a bit of a mix of Frazetta, Grindhouse and a bit of Cbag’s special blend.

BTW – I created everything on here, even re-created the logo (that part took the extra 10 minutes ).

That’s it for this week, Cbag out.

The client – completely unsolicited! – even made a wonderful review of my work over on his blog.

I’m a day late (but it’s still on the long weekend, so I’m saying it qualifies) and this week’s project is actual paying work.

These are all first drafts, with no feedback (beyond the initial brief) so it I’m allowing it.

Last week, I was approached by an event company that runs corporate team-building events, and was presented with an incredible opportunity: to create caricatures of characters from Hamlet, caricatures featuring an expression that captures the essence of the character. These caricatures would then be placed on cards which would be randomly passed out to the people in the workshop, who in turn would act out a scene from Hamlet.

The first challenge, of course, would be to capture the essential emotion of each character – the company gave me my starting point by defining the characteristics I was to evoke.

The second challenge proved to be a daunting one: Hamlet’s characteristics. Hamlet is the most complex character in the play – at the start of the play, he is genuinely melancholy, the middle of the play he is shifts between depression and rage… *and* feigns happiness/insanity/etc. So, I had to capture these characteristics on a single card – and I am quite pleased with my solution, which I feel is very elegant: as these are cards to be randomly handed out, why not style them as actual playing cards? Therefore, I can represent the depression and the rage of Hamlet on one card, without looking contrived.

Lastly, I wanted to keep the connection to the source material, so I created a colour palette based on colours Renaissance painters would use (yellow ochre, burnt sienna, etc).

Thrift, thrift, Horatio; the spoils of the payment does warmly satisfy the hunger of the project.

The astute observer might notice that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are coloured in the exact same colour palette. This is by design: the two characters are almost interchangeable in their behaviour, which is one of the themes explored in the play and film ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ (I highly recommend the film if you havent seen it, Richard Dreyfuss, Tim Roth and Gary Oldman – you cant go wrong!) where many of the characters confuse Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves! – I thought it would be clever to evoke this ambiguity by using the same colour palette for both of them.

Cbag out – to sleep; perchance to dream; aye, there’s the rub.

This week is a design exercise, and the exercise was to re-design the Blood Bowl team roster to make it more user friendly. I realize most people use those new-fangled spreadsheet programs, but us luddites actually prefer the tactile nature of hand-written sheets, and the simple charm of napkin math. This week’s project is intended for us.

One of the issues I had with the existing design was that alot of the space was poorly used – the old design (which I do not have copyright of, so will not post) allowed a ton of room for categories which were more-or-less ‘yes/no’ areas, while other areas were woefully small (I’m looking at you, Skill column).

Also, the process for calculating team value involves alot of addition of multiple lines, but the categories which changed the least, had the most entries (player cost). To further confuse matters, a new variable was added in recent rules revisions (Player Value) which changes periodically, but the real-world implementation is different than the game designers envisioned: they envision adding the Player Value modifier to the cost of the player, then totalling the revised player costs… how people actually do it is to total the player cost (which hardly ever changes once set), then total the Player Value Mods (much smaller numbers), then add those 2 values together; my new design takes this into account and adds a line at the bottom for ‘Player Cost’ (conveniently labelled column A) plus Player Value Modifier (labelled column B), giving a total.

Lastly, I’ve noticed even veteran Blood Bowl players refer to the rulebook when it came to player advancement. Player advancement amounted to consulting 3 different tables, on 2 different pages. I felt this information could very easily be gathered, and turned into 4 simple line entries in a separate section on their own.

Without further adieu!

Mmmmmm - tabley!

And a PDF for anyone who wants a high-res version:

XTBBF Team Roster PDF

Function determining form is the essence of good design.

(For all the non-Blood Bowlers reading this, dont be shocked by all the abbreviations – those are standard in the game, and would be readily understood by the players. )

Cbag out!

This week is an exploration of Corel Painter once again, this time their pencil crayon hard media tools.

Cbag out!