Every December, I aspire to make my own holiday cards to send out to loved ones. Maybe every two or three years do I make that a reality. As I consider this year’s design, I thought I’d share last year’s holiday cards, where I went with quantity over quality and designed three of them.
If you want to print any of these cards for your own use, have at it! They can be found here as a PDF. The cards are laid out two to a page, so will have a finished size of 4.25″x5.5″ once folded.
My sister-in-law bought me a small sketchbook for Christmas last year. At first, I didn’t really know what to do with it and spent a week or so jotting down thoughts before I went to bed. Because I can be pretty dumb about obvious things, it took me a while to figure out that one of the things I could do with the book was to sketch things in it.
I hadn’t been drawing regularly for a few years, so it took me a while to figure out the things that I could sketch. It started out with weird self-portraits and drawing Donald Trump as a swastika. After a couple of months, I realized that I could start drawing scenes from the Dungeons & Dragons games that I run. I could even draw scenes in advance, and show them to the players as they were happening!
Anyway, here’s some of those drawings:
I can’t remember what game this came from, but white guys being assholes is a pretty consistent theme in my games.
Here’s some more white guys being real jerks. One of them ended up getting killed and then being made into a stew.
The above two are from a game we never got around to playing. An evil creature had trapped a small village in a never-ending winter, and a small band of people teamed together to escape the village and seek help from a neighboring town. This guy was the only one who made it to the town, but not before the evil creature (a monster called a Bheurr Hag) knocked him out and stole one of his gloves, resulting in the hand that I drew. Pro-tip: don’t Google “frostbite”!
On the way out to confront the hag and rescue the village, the D&D players would encounter this dragon, which some of them have encountered before. It’s not particularly bright – it’s pretty much a talking house cat, just much, much bigger than a house cat. A house cat that can breathe a cone of frost that can freeze people to death in seconds. The players will eventually run into this guy again.
Here’s the Bheurr Hag that the characters would eventually have to confront. In the game lore, it’s a creature that delights in causing the suffering of others, so her goal was to try to threaten the characters enough to send them back to the town for reinforcements, thus bringing her more people to torture.
Here’s the village that the characters would try to save. Of the 110 inhabitants, only 24 were to be alive at the beginning of the game. The Bheurr Hag wanted to drive them to cannibalism, but the village people were too smart for that – they knew about wendigos!
You might notice that there’s a ballista in the picture of the village. I’d first started planning this game back in February, and at that time, the big bad guy was supposed to be the dragon. But then this past season of Game of Thrones happened, and suddenly my plans looked like they would have been derivative! It still would have been a useful weapon to use against the hag.
The sketchbook is nearly full now, and I’ll get another one for the next year. I’ve been really enjoying doing these type of drawings, so I am sure that I will post more in the future. And if you’re ever interested in joining in on one of my D&D games, get in touch with me via Facebook.
A macabre friend of mine is celebrating her birthday, so I made her this birthday card.
It’s easy to think that the Internet is home to every crazy image that you can possibly imagine, but sometimes it fails you. And when that happens, you just have to come up with the image yourself. With that in mind: Dear Internet, please accept this image of Senator Ted Cruz as one of Santa’s elves.
