Categories
Animals Art Design Games

XP Academy (updated)

I’m doodling heraldry again…

(Also it’s for D&D again.)

Board with Life‘s Adventures in the New World campaign is coming to a close and the next campaign is XP Academy. A Harry Potter-esque school for heroes.

Of course, I couldn’t resist thinking about school arms, crest, and motto.

Update: I’ve put together a cleaner version (not including the supporters yet):

And the original sketch:

The arms were obvious. Four quarters (like our four Hogwarts houses) but for the four core classes: Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, and Rogue. Sword, wand, hand and daggers to represent each.

For the motto I wanted something a bit clever. After dancing around a riff on hic sunt dracones for a while (and a brief dalliance with an XP/expecto patronum something or other) I got it: Solve for XP.

It riffs on ‘solve for x’ as a common maths question, has a sense of school patriotism (‘solve puzzles and challenges for XP Academy’), and literally describes what the characters will do. (Then Google translated into Latin cos, you know.)

For our crest we have a Dragon emerging from a Dungeon (for hopefully obvious reasons).

And for our supporters we have a Beaver and an Owl. The Owl represents knowledge, learning, wisdom. The Beaver represents hard-work, and reflects the story from medieval bestiaries where beavers would bite off their own testes to escape hunters (heroes: know when to run!). It was also an excuse to draw a heraldic beaver. They’re pretty weird.

Who knows if this is anywhere near what Donald had in mind! Luckily I won’t have to wait long to find out.

In the meantime I’ll maybe work this up from idle doodle to something a bit cleaner (that mantling needs work for sure). Update: I did!

Categories
Animals Art Me

A skaldic poem about my cats

Witch’s-friend, claws clutching
cold flesh. No more golden
balls to fetch or falls for
fair maidens this jade-prince.
Her mirror, still, murmurs;
mouse-bane in dreams, house-tame
she lies. A lap-lion,
loathe to win her dinner.

Edit: I made a change to lines 3 and 4 after Dr Jackson Crawford pointed out I had ‘for’ as a stress syllable in line 4.

Categories
Animals Art Technology

Arcimboldosaurus

I absolutely adore this:

https://twitter.com/chrisrodley/status/875266719660482560

This second set is the real Arcimboldo stuff:

https://twitter.com/chrisrodley/status/875552196120662017

I want actual books of this. If someone tells me where to throw my money to make this happen I will throw my money there.

Categories
Animals Art Illustration

Birbs

Quentin Blake curates an exhibition of his own illustrations of birds at House of Illustration, running May to October 2017.

Categories
Animals Me Photography

Molly

You can call me flower if you want

A post shared by Dan Connolly (@moscatdan) on

Categories
Animals Me Photography

A run to bluebells

In October I will be running 8km around the Isle of Kerrera, the run is immediately preceded by a 14km bike ride around the same island, which in turn is preceded by a 550m swim across Oban Bay.

I’m pretty happy with my current fitness levels but the Craggy Island Triathlon is something of a step up (I’ve never done an open water swim, and of the several hundred hours of cycling I’ve done in the last year about 6 have been outdoors).

I formally kicked off my training with a run this morning, I didn’t have much of a plan and ended up doing an 8.5 mile out and back run to a lovely bluebell wood I stumbled across in between startling a heron (who in turn seriously startled me) and meeting a lovely horse.