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Lacking Talent

I am somewhat artistically challenged. I can do a lot of things but the two weakest facets of my personality are drawing and music. There is little or no need for music in solo role-playing books so that is fine.

Drawing and all the other visual arts, in contrast, would be an immense benefit, if it was something I could actually do.

What brought this on was a discussion about orcs.

I was a tweet this morning about OrcTober. I do like a good mega-thread and I was tempted, I was thinking I could get some ideas together, and then I saw Inktober. A 31 day drawing challenge. The chances of me producing anything passable everyday for a month is nil, but what if I signed up for one of these drawing courses, teach yourself to draw in a month, sort of thing. I could then share what I was striving for, and what I managed to produce.

The goal would be to be able to illustrate my own books, eventually. If you are a publisher, or aspiring publisher, you will know about the hundreds of dollars we spend even on simple stock art. Being able to create even simple ‘page fillers’, those small images you see in rulebooks that balance the columns of text, would save me about $100 a year.

Using off the shelf stock are also leaves you at the mercy of the limits of what is available. Some genres are over served, others, not so much.

So that is my goal. Throughout October, I am going to follow a course, learn to draw, and just for an added challenge, I will try to create at least one piece of stock art good enough to list on DTRPG for other publishers to use.

How hard can it be?

4 thoughts on “Lacking Talent”

  1. The next problem is, what course to take? There are quite a few around in different formats. Another problem is that it’s recommended to draw from life to start with. Many RPG illustrations don’t fall into that category.

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