The Penguins!

Two of my little brothers have an imaginary band called "The Penguins". It was named by the seven year old one who loves to sing 7 Nation Army by the White Stripes, and Wake Up by Acade Fire. I Hate Cows was written by my 19 year old brother, because my parents have cows that he hates to take care of.

I wanted to do a band poster for them, so here it is!

Google Wave Avatars

There was a request made that I post the individual pictures of characters so people could use them as Avatars, so here they Ava-are. haha! Old-man style joke!

Warrior Sketch 2

Here's another one!

Warrior Comic Page Draft

This is one idea I've been kicking around. I thought it would be entertaining to have a fantasy warrior fighting modern-day or future-day crime. Let me know what you think!

Warrior Sketch

So, I have an idea for a comic book, and here's a quick sketch of one of the characters... possibly. It's still in its severe embryonic stages, but I thought I'd share! :)

The Wave Line-Up

Here's the Gang!

I'm posting this picture for a few reasons. The first one being that I got Adobe Illustrator for Christmas and I'm super happy to be using this program from home!

The second reason is that we had an awesome D&D campaign session over Google Wave last night, and I wanted to showcase the characters that we used. It was way fun.

I hope you enjoy the picture!

Google Wave Session (D&D)

Tonight was my first time playing 4e, and it was incredible. The funny thing is, I played this session entirely with people I've only met on Twitter, and the campaign started on Google Wave.

Wave is an interesting medium to RPG in, with some pros and cons.

Pros:

-Everyone can type their background stories simultaneously, then you can read them during a lull in play or while you're waiting for the DM to set up.

-In my opinion, it is much easier to really role play when you can type! You don't have to make up a voice for your character, and you can differentiate between player and character dialog much easier than when you speak.

-Because you're already on a computer, it's easy to use online accessories to the game, like iPlay4e.appspot.com/ for your character sheet.

Cons:

-It's slow. Maybe that's just because everyone was getting used to using Wave, but the first round took close to an hour! (After that it sped up quite a bit.)

-The map is hard to sync. We used an app called "fighty" tonight, but we had some problems with the map updating on everyone's screen correctly. Next week we might use a silverlight program that is available at dndorks.com/

-It's hard to feel very social when you can't see or hear anyone. Skype might solve this problem too.



All in all, It was awesome! Looking forward to more action!

If you aren't on Google Wave yet, you are missing out! Comment on this post or send me a message with your email address and I'll send you an invite!

Happy Holidays and here's to a great 2010

Dragonborn Preliminary Painting

Since I've done way too many Goliath Sketches recently, I decided I'd switch it up and paint a Dragonborn character. Let me know what you think!

Oil and Colored Pencil Face

I needed to make a new twitter avatar, so here it is!

More Goliath Warden Sketches

Hey, everybody! More sketches of my Goliath Earth Warden from Dungeons and Dragons.

Dungeons and Dragons: 4th Edition

I really want to play Dungeons and Dragons 4e. An I mean REALLY! By play, I mean not Dungeon Master. Most rpg games I've played have come to campaign fruition by my own efforts, because I'm the initiator. I DM for my siblings and some friends, but I don't know many people personally that will DM for me so that I can play a character instead of running the show.

There are a couple of guys that I play d20Modern with, but the DM doesn't keep a campaign for enough time to get any one character past level 5. Recently he's decided that he is getting sick of the d20 system, that it's too complicated. Others in the group have decided they're sick of tabletop gaming and only play Modern Warfare and Assassin's Creed on xbox. Now we've started playing my friend's homemade rpg system with less people.

His rpg system, named simply "E-Z RPG", is well made, and mathematically sound, but I have a few issues with it.

1. It's boring. We still only play campaigns for about 3-4 sessions. Nothing fun happens, and the DM sometimes just adapts movies he's seen to the storyline.

2. Dice. In his system, you pretty much only use d6's. I like using d20's and other weird shaped dice! I just don't feel as nerdy using mostly "muggle" dice.

3. Everything's standardized. A Maul does the same damage as a Sword. All characters are human. There's no magic besides some limited psionics. I like making bizarre characters! (Although, I guess making generic characters is just as bad as investing time and effort to making an awesome character that doesn't make it past level 3.)

So, besides my lack of support, there's also the issue of 4e. I've heard that some people don't like it. I've read about it, thumbed through some books at my local HaJoMaJe ( http://www.hajomaje.com/ ) and downloaded the character creator demo from the dnd website. I like it a lot, from what I see. I COULD get the Player's Handbooks 1 and 2 for a deal right now... but I don't want to have books I can't convince others into using. Blah.

Is 4e worth it? Please comment!

-Kyle Ferrin

iPod blog

This is just a quick test to see if I can update my blog from the old iPod touch.

If this works, maybe I'll write more instead of posting just pictures!

Is this more like it?

Hey, Matt! Is this more cartoony? I guess I'm not sure what you want.

Goliath Earth-Warden

Alright! Here's the finished product of my Goliath Earth-Warden character performing the Earth Spikes attack! Good stuff!

Warden Sketch

This is my original sketch for the Goliath Warden that I want to play in fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons. He hasn't been inked or colored yet, but I thought you might be interested to see the process. Let me know what you think!

Complete Game Pieces!

Here are the completed game pieces!

Matt's Better Profile

Okay, I personally would rather have this avatar over the previous, but that's more like an opinion. :)

Let me know what you think!

Matt's Profile

Here's a draft of Matt's Avatar, It's not quite done yet. He's a guy from twitter that asked me if I would do a new Avatar for him. I was playing around on Painter 11 since I only have a couple more days on my Illustrator CS4 trial. We'll see how it turns out in the end. I still have a lot of work to do on it.

Getting Closer...

The game pieces are coming along nicely! One more guy and some finishing touches! Then it's on to making the board and the cards for the game.

Board Game Pieces

Okay! Making a board game for my brother's Christmas Present. I've been using "sculpey", a polymer clay. It hardens well in the oven, but I'm afraid my technique isn't perfect. These are a little bigger than plastic army men, so the details aren't flawless.

I might just paint these and see how they look. If the details still bug me I might make them bigger or use wire frames for skeletons. We'll see!

Board Game?

I drew my little brother's name for Christmas, and I'm thinking of making him a fantasy genre board game. Here's one of my ideas of a character named "Hammer".

So, now that I have this concept, I'm going to try to render Hammer in sculpey. We'll see how it goes, I have a lot of work to do on this before Christmas.

Thor-toon

Check out my other blog! It's brand new and shiny, and it's all about Thor! http://asgardsfavorite.blogspot.com/

New Avatar

I decided, since it's a new month, that I should change up my avatar on facebook and twitter. What do you think?