Categories
Art Design Games

Swords

I’m doing #swordvember this year (I was doing #mapvember too but I think maps should be like a once a week thing for me rather than a once a day – I get too bogged down overthinking them).

No problems overthinking swords though! Check out some of these dumb swords:


https://twitter.com/dan_connolly/status/795309130386903040

the-hilt

The last one is a sneak peek of tomorrow’s (the hilt of many blades).

Even though many (all?) of these are patently stupid I’m tempted to actually write up rules for them and render them all in a consistent style. Maybe stick it on DMs Guild for a buck or something!

Categories
Design Me

Letterers

In case you’ve ever wondered about comic book lettering and the ‘comic book font’.

Typography is certainly an interest of mine. A pet peeve when I used to work as a graphic designer would be the inevitable ‘can you send me the font’ after I’d put together some hand-drawn lettering. And even when I had used a commercial font in some logo design the insistence of colleagues that *everything* related to that brand be written in that font (no matter how ill suited) drove me nuts.

I also love the word letterers (see also slaverers).

Categories
Comics Design

Avengers

avengers

Far from an original idea (I don’t even need to google it to know that there will be a hundred takes on superhero coats of arms) but it was fun to think how I might represent each hero without just resorting to their logo/uniform on a shield.

Banner is a personal fave. The two halves of his shield for the two halves of his personality. The left side has a snake wrapped around a staff, a nod to his title (I know he’s a physicist rather than an MD but we do see him treating the sick), by cropping the head/tail of the snake also represents a gamma wave.

banner

The snake wrapped around the branch also led to the crest: a dragon chasing a dove. In medieval bestiaries, doves would fly to the Peridexion tree to escape the dragon (the devil) and the tree would keep them safe. On the shield the serpent is climbing the tree, it simultaneously represents the good Banner could do as a doctor and the worst that he lets in to the world.

Natasha’s crest is fun too. All the guys have such martial crests but she’s a spy, hers should be more subtle.

natasha

The wheel has eight spokes (legs) and looks like a spider sat on a web, it also spins thread like a spider, or spins a yarn like a spy. And if fairy tales have taught us anything it’s that a spinning wheel can be pretty deadly: Natasha isn’t the girl pricking her finger on the spindle, she’s the point of the needle.

A bit of fun for a Sunday morning.

Categories
Design Humanities People

Remove all French words from British passports

This… This is a joke… right?

Whether ‘Dieu et mon droit’ and ‘Honi qui mal y pense’ have existed as mottos in England for ages is irrelevant. French is an EU language and has no place on a UK passport.

Hmm. Where to start.

Ukpassport-cover

Well, passport is a French word so we’ll probably have to get rid of that too.

‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ is the motto of the Order of the Garter. A 700 year old order that represent the third highest honour the UK can bestow upon an individual and is dedicated to St George, the patron saint of England. Then again he was Syrian and I guess even if we gave the French a pass we wouldn’t want anything to do with Syrians on there either so the motto is definitely gone.

I’m pretty sure Lions aren’t native to the UK so they’ll have to go too. The Unicorn will need to fuck off back to Narnia. I guess we can keep the harp though, we have harps, right? And the crown. We definitely have a crown. Although the fleur-de-lis will have to go. And the crosses pattée. Some of those jewels look a bit foreign to me too.

Thinking about it English will probably remain an EU language in which case we can’t have the words “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” on there either. Dirty EU languages.

So I *think* the new British passport is a shield with a harp in the lower left quarter, with a jewel-less crown on top and no words. Oh, and a blue background. Don’t forget the blue background.

passport
Categories
Comics Design

Cap

cap

Cap for funsies. Mostly playing with outlines on my charges, adding helms and mantles, and crests. Thinking of working this up into a set.

Categories
Design Games

The Southern Sanction

(I’m a sucker for completeness)

southern-kingdoms

We don’t know much about the old Kingdoms of the Southern Sanction. We know the names of their capitals (Saldon, Holgast, Tirrell) but the names of the kingdoms themselves are lost… (or not on the map at least!)

We know that the lich performed the rite of desecration to halt the destruction of the forest so we could try to symbolise how the landscape changed as the kingdoms of men spread.

(And we can always just do something cool for no good reason because why the hell not.)

The First Kingdom

saldon

Starting in the East we have our first kingdom. This one is closest to Titan’s Gate, on the fringes of the forest. I imagine this kingdom would have had the best chance of clearing the most land before the kingdoms fell, it’s also served by three rivers.

The gold and green check represents the verdant pastures (green) and abundant crops (gold). It’s also distinct from the other kingdoms so far, we haven’t use chequy anywhere else.

The Second Kingdom

holgast

Next up we have the kingdom to the South. My initial idea for one of the kingdoms was inspired by something I saw in York Minster a couple of weeks ago:

skirlaw

I loved the idea of arrows or daggers intertwined with tree trunks. It could represent conflict with the forest itself as the people of the kingdom carved out their domain, or their prowess as hunters.

Or maybe there’s an old folk tale of the first king of these lands who blooded three arrows and fired each to mark the bounds of his kingdom, the land feared his reach would be too far and give him dominion over the whole world so a great forest sprung up and trapped his arrows and that’s where the forest first came from.

But, ultimately I decided this was too fiddly a device for one of the main kingdoms. I liked the idea of including a weapon (as none of the human kingdoms do yet) so I figured three swords worked. As the southern kingdom’s capital is near(ish) to the coast the blue field works, and with the marsh to the North and the goliath to the East I figure they would have had plenty of groups to fight.

The Third Kingdom

tirrell

Finally we have the kingdom to the North. These guys are closest to the lich’s island, I reckon they would have had to carve their lands from the thickest, darkest forest. My first thought was an axe but we’ve already got blades for the kingdom to the south and axes evoke some of our dwarven kingdoms so my next thought was fire.

We haven’t used rayonny anywhere else and they’re the only human kingdom using red so they’re still distinct. I went for the flames moving across rather than burning up or down to give them feel that they are crawling across the shield much as the flames of men would’ve burned across the land.

southern-kingdoms