Marvels Of Thedas | The Flooded Cave, Crestwood

A little dragon based on a bismuth geode. I’ll be most likely making a few more dragon-geode pictures soon. I went in without a plan (oh boy the amount of scribbling seen in the time lapse video…) so I’m really pleased with how this turned out.

patreon || dA || twitter || process video

Nüshu (literally “women’s writing” in Chinese) is a syllabic script created and used exclusively by women in the Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China. Up until the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) women were forbidden access to formal education, and so Nüshu was developed in secrecy as a means to communicate. Since its discovery in 1982, Nüshu remains to be the only gender-specific writing system in the world. Read more here.

I don’t really know what people generally call this method of sigil making, so I’m just calling it “Letter Shaping” because you’re using the basic shapes from certain letters. This is the most common form of sigil making, and it allows the most creative influence. As you see above the sigils are for nearly the same thing, yet the sigils came out completely different. Not because the purpose was different, but because I approached them both a different creative way, and that’s what I like so much about this method. There’s a lot of freedom and personalization involved.

(UPDATE: Here’s a link to a guide on how to deconstruct letters down to basic shapes)

Beautiful Nouveau Facades and more from Barcelona by ROC

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All photos by stoptheroc.tumblr.com

Thanks lensblr-network

I think I want these now…

I want a story about a king whose son is prophesied to kill him so the king is like “whatever what am I supposed to do, kill my own kid wtf is wrong with you” so he just raises him as normal, doesn’t even tell him about the prophecy, and instead of some convoluted twist of events that leads to the king’s murder the son grows up and when the king is very old and dying and in excruciating pain the kid is just like alright I'mma put him out of his misery.

I'm pretty new here, and I don't actually know much about dinosaurs (just followed this blog because it seemed really cool and interesting) so could you explain what shrink-wrapped means?

Of course! See, modern animals have a lot of muscles, fat, fluff, etc, and end up looking very little like their actual skeleton. For example, look at how much fluff owls have:

(Source)

However, lots of palaeoartists completely ignore this! They basically stretch skin over the bones and call it a day. One especially bad example that was featured on @palaeofail is this poor pterosaur:

It barely has room for its digestive system. It’s definitely missing the air sac system that allows it to breathe. It’s got virtually no muscles on the arms - how does it fly?? - on the head (no wonder its mouth is open. It has no jaw muscles to close it!), on the torso (it needs to flap), or on the legs (walking) It doesn’t have any fat at all, so it’s definitely starving (maybe because it can’t fly or close its moth?). The skin is much too thin; you can see all of the bones and its wing membranes should be much, much thicker. And it’s missing the hair-like pycnofibres that should be covering its body!

Many palaeoartists have started to strike back at this by drawing modern animals like we might draw them if we found their bones:

(Source)

[House cat]

(Source)

Yatagan Sword from the Court of Süleyman the Magnificent (reigned 1520–66)

Dated: circa 1525–30

Sword maker: Workshop of Ahmed Tekelü (possibly Iranian, active Istanbul, ca. 1520–30)

Geography: Istanbul

Culture: Ottoman, Istanbul

Medium: steel, gold, ivory (walrus), silver, turquoise, pearls, rubies

Measurements: overall length 23 3/8 inches (59.3 cm); blade length 18 3/8 inches (46.7 cm); weight 1 lb. 8 oz. (691 g)

Exquisite workmanship and lavish use of precious materials distinguish this sword as a princely weapon and exemplifies the opulence and refinement of Ottoman luxury arts. Almost identical to a yatagan (now in the Topkapi Palace, Istanbul) made in 1526–27 by the court jeweller Ahmed Tekel, for the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66), this sword was undoubtedly made in the same imperial workshop.

The gold incrustation on the blade depicts a combat between a dragon and a phoenix against a background of foliage scrolls. These figures, like the gold-inlaid cloud bands and foliage scrolls on the ivory grips, are Chinese in inspiration, and were probably introduced into Ottoman art through contacts with Persia.

This sword is one of the earliest known yatagans, distinctly Turkish weapons characterised by a double-curved blade and a hilt without a guard. Yatagans were commonplace in Turkey and the Balkans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and served as sidearms for the elite troops known as Janissaries.

Source: Copyright © 2016 Metropolitan Museum of Art

Author Scott Lynch responds to a critic of the character Zamira Drakasha, a black woman pirate in his fantasy book Red Seas Under Red Skies, the second novel of the Gentleman Bastard series.

The bolded sections represent quotes from the criticism he received. All the z-snaps are in order.

Your characters are unrealistic stereotpyes of political correctness. Is it really necessary for the sake of popular sensibilities to have in a fantasy what we have in the real world? I read fantasy to get away from politically correct cliches. 

God, yes! If there’s one thing fantasy is just crawling with these days it’s widowed black middle-aged pirate moms.  Real sea pirates could not be controlled by women, they were vicous rapits and murderers and I am sorry to say it was a man’s world. It is unrealistic wish fulfilment for you and your readers to have so many female pirates, especially if you want to be politically correct about it! First, I will pretend that your last sentence makes sense because it will save us all time. Second, now you’re pissing me off.  You know what? Yeah, Zamira Drakasha, middle-aged pirate mother of two, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy. I realized this as she was evolving on the page, and you know what? I fucking embrace it.  Why shouldn’t middle-aged mothers get a wish-fulfillment character, you sad little bigot? Everyone else does. H.L. Mencken once wrote that “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” I can’t think of anyone to whom that applies more than my own mom, and the mothers on my friends list, with the incredible demands on time and spirit they face in their efforts to raise their kids, preserve their families, and save their own identity/sanity into the bargain.  Shit yes, Zamira Drakasha, leaping across the gap between burning ships with twin sabers in hand to kick in some fucking heads and sail off into the sunset with her toddlers in her arms and a hold full of plundered goods, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy from hell. I offer her up on a silver platter with a fucking bow on top; I hope she amuses and delights. In my fictional world, opportunities for butt-kicking do not cease merely because one isn’t a beautiful teenager or a muscle-wrapped font of testosterone. In my fictional universe, the main characters are a fat ugly guy and a skinny forgettable guy, with a supporting cast that includes “SBF, 41, nonsmoker, 2 children, buccaneer of no fixed abode, seeks unescorted merchant for light boarding, heavy plunder.” You don’t like it? Don’t buy my books. Get your own fictional universe. Your cabbage-water vision of worldbuilding bores me to tears.  As for the “man’s world” thing, religious sentiments and gender prejudices flow differently in this fictional world. Women are regarded as luckier, better sailors than men. It’s regarded as folly for a ship to put to sea without at least one female officer; there are several all-female naval military traditions dating back centuries, and Drakasha comes from one of them. As for claims to “realism,” your complaint is of a kind with those from bigoted hand-wringers who whine that women can’t possibly fly combat aircraft, command naval vessels, serve in infantry actions, work as firefighters, police officers, etc. despite the fact that they do all of those things– and are, for a certainty, doing them all somewhere at this very minute. Tell me that a fit fortyish woman with 25+ years of experience at sea and several decades of live bladefighting practice under her belt isn’t a threat when she runs across the deck toward you, and I’ll tell you something in return– you’re gonna die of stab wounds. What you’re really complaining about isn’t the fact that my fiction violates some objective “reality,” but rather that it impinges upon your sad, dull little conception of how the world works. I’m not beholden to the confirmation of your prejudices; to be perfectly frank, the prospect of confining the female characters in my story to placid, helpless secondary places in the narrative is so goddamn boring that I would rather not write at all. I’m not writing history, I’m writing speculative fiction. Nobody’s going to force you to buy it. Conversely, you’re cracked if you think you can persuade me not to write about what amuses and excites me in deference to your vision, because your vision fucking sucks. I do not expect to change your mind but i hope that you will at least consider that I and others will not be buying your work because of these issues. I have been reading science fiction and fantasy for years and i know that I speak for a great many people. I hope you might stop to think about the sales you will lose because you want to bring your political corectness and foul language into fantasy. if we wanted those things we could go to the movies. Think about this!  Thank you for your sentiments. I offer you in exchange this engraved invitation to go piss up a hill, suitable for framing.

Resource: Map-Making Brushes/Icons

Here’s another resource courtesy of my D&D campaign planning! I decided to put together some Photoshop brushes to make map creation easier, since I have a crapton of maps to make. The above example is still a somewhat rough work in progress, but it gives you a decent idea of what you can do with the brushes. Once I had the outline drawn, it only took about ten minutes to fill in most of the geography and other details (naming things admittedly took much longer lol).

Each brush in the set is hand-drawn by me, so they work well if you’re looking to quickly create a digital map that still has an old-fashioned look. They’re also hi-res enough to use with maps that you plan to print out, as that was my original intent when I made them for myself.

These could work nicely with the world map template I made last month— I used them to trace over a generated map to give it a hand-drawn feel that was more in line with a Dungeons & Dragons game.

What this download contains:

A set of Photoshop brushes with built in brush settings

A .psd file of the original hand-drawn icons in case you want to edit/remake/etc. anything

A hi-res .png of the icon file in case you don’t have Photoshop or otherwise want to make brushes for another program

The brush/icon pack is available for download here.

As with all my content, this is a free resource, but if you find it helpful and have a couple spare bucks lying around, please consider making a small donation to help keep this blog running and creating original content!