Witcher Rooftops

I don't know where these rooftops are located, but they look like they could appear in a bustling village in an episode of The Witcher. OK, the bricks (and is that a skylight?) are a bit off theme, but imagination does the needful. I've been following the TV show, but had not delved into the books of Andrzej Sapkowski until recently. I've been reading (well, listening) to The Sword of Destiny, purportedly a solid introduction to the world. The impetus: a few friends of mine have invited me to join in a Witcher-themed campaign of Dungeons and Dragons, which I know even less about and had not played before.

Now, every other Sunday, I find myself gathered around a table with a handful of D20s and D8s (many-sided die). As a Bard-class character, I cast "spells" and roll for ability checks, wisdom checks, and probably other checks yet unknown. And if I'm going to role-play in the world of Geralt and Ciri, I'll need grounding in the setting. And the setting is a smidge dismal and squalid, something like a noir detective novel set in the age of portcullises. Demons of varying caliber lurk in every town, and Witchers are the semi-human agents trained to hunt them for a small fee. Often, though, Witchers are asked to kill more than monsters and must negotiate their already tinted code of conduct.

I began this wash with a tint made literally of tea. I'd never tried it before, and organic tints and inks are becoming interesting to me. I sketched in pencil and inked with Micron fineliners, which were actually be too precise for my taste here, so I often recrossed the lines to make them messier. I then worked in with my usual wash in a few layers. I considered working in with white for highlights, but the tea tint is a pretty light base, and anyways, I want it murky.

Probably a striga or a noonwraith or some other suitible target for Witchers would flit between these buildings during a transitional moment, which is what this view captures. In the story of these rooftops, someone is crouched, one arm around a crumbling chimney, waiting for something to begin.

Note: I used a photo reference for this image. Credit to GripsPix on Flickr.

Comments

Artifact Studies and Random Notes

In junior high school I collaborated on a project with a small, mostly-female group of students. We were to design a unique, fictional culture and build illustrative cultural artifacts. We would bury said artifacts in a cardboard box filled with soil. Another team would then excavate our artifacts and guess about our culture. After several days of creative deliberation, we designed a pyramid-based matriarchy wherein men were kept underground as slaves, brought out occasionally to build more pyramids. Elvis was God. According to the artifact of my memory, middle school was a confused and hostile culture. I began this week's illustrations, again, with visual research. I still don't know everything about these artifacts, but my Stebbins Dance Festival book has some interesting statements about them. Part of what I do know I impart below. According to their cultural artifacts, the Yup'ik people practice artful dancing to drums while waving furred objects. They also spend time ...

Ad Hominem and the Carney Lexicon

Ad hominem is one of the better-known fallacies, perhaps because it is so common. In Latin, it means: "to the man." In American, it translates fuzzily to: "Oh yeah? Well, you're ugly." Broken down, the ad hominem argument looks like this: Person 1 makes claim X There is something objectionable about Person 1 (maybe ugliness) Therefore claim X is false Ad hominem is one of the many red-herring arguments, fallacious when it diverts attention from the core argument to focus on some flaw about the arguer. In creating my illustration, I needed a distracting character, and what character is more distracting than one of those bellowing circus-game people with the rings, bottles, and inflatable dolphin prizes? I quickly realized my vocabulary lacked a word for a purveyor of state-fair gamery, other than the generic "carney." Perhaps this is because I have never played a circus game, due to my lack of coordination and my dominant interest in spending my tick...

Work from Home

The reference for this piece is a known work of fine art: a photograph by Peter Mitchell, a lorry driver who traversed West Yorkshire and occasionally snapped photos. The piece is titled Eric Massheder, Leeds, (1975) . Eric is the man in the doorway, a drippings refinery worker who posed in his home, adjacent (really, attached) to the refinery where he worked for 12 years. Eric woke up in his home in the morning, walked one room (or so) over, and began his shift. I have changed and omitted a few details for the sake of composition as usual. I've now been working from home for about four years, and I make a similar commute without stepping outdoors. My house even resembles Eric's a bit, though there's no factory nearby. I enter my workplace by transferring a USB cable, which joins all of my input and output devices from my personal computer to my work laptop. I stoop under my desk to make the transfer, so possibly a similar amount of exercise is involved—the digital equiva...

Design & Execution

Search This Blog