ZTE Blade

perennial assailant for role-playing game characters

By The Illustrator  |  2011/07/29 11:55 Posted in Illustration, Role-Playing Games, ZTE Blade  |  Comments (2)

rampaging monster plantThe word on Illustration Friday this week is perennial – and of course my thoughts turned to some sort of rampoaging plant-based monster for use in role playing games.

I have had no time on my Wacom pad and computer and have instead been sketching this image on my phone on the tram to work and back. I’m using Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile on my ZTE Blade ‘San Francisco’ Android phone. Using the version of Android that the phone shipped with I was having all kinds of trouble sketching on the capacitative screen, even with a good quality stylus from Wacom. But then I upgraded the operating system to a version of Android Gingerbread moded especially for the blade, called Cyanmod, and now the phone can cope with sketching without lagging, crashing and creating monstrous pixelated and rasterised lines.

Upgrading to CyanMod was a traumatic process, and there where moments when all the phone was giving me were cryptic lines of text in green on a black background. I thought for sure I had bricked my device. But in the end I got everything setup, and it was all worth it. I can now sketch on the tram, and neednt have such trouble from my conscience about not getting any art done for the role-playing games I’m developing.

Even after a couple of hours work, the images are nothing like the quality that camn be achieved on the computer of course, but hopefully I’ll be able to find time to add the finishing touches to turn them into proper completed bits of game art.

 

Eclipse Phase – interesting role-playing game concept.

By The Illustrator  |  2011/03/04 23:11 Posted in Role-Playing Games, ZTE Blade  |  Comments (0)

I was looking through the DrivethruRPG website looking for cool free stuff, when I found Eclipse Phase. This isn’t listed as a free game, but when I had a quick look though the sample PDF I noticed something…

It’s free – or at least the text is – it’s made available by the authors, Catalyst Game Labs, an imprint of InMediaRes Productions, LLC PMB 202 – 303 – 91st Ave. NE, G-701 Lake Stevens, WA 98258, under a creative commons license. Specifically, as it says in the game’s pdf text file -

Creative Commons License; Some Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to: Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

(What this means is that you are free to copy, share, and remix the text and artwork within this book under the following conditions:

1. you do so only for noncommercial purposes
2. you attribute Posthuman Studios
3. you license any derivatives under the same license.

For specific details, appropriate credits, and updates/changes to this license, please see: http://eclipsephase.com/cclicense)

I’m going to be reading this on my phone and do a review as soon as I get through reading it as I go backwards and forwards on the tram between my various important engagements.

I’m excited about this game – I love everything with an open source element, I really think it’s the future – and until I’ve read the text here are the various different files for Eclipse Phase.

Eclipse Phase the role-playing game (text) as PDF

Eclipse Phase the role-playing game (text) as ePub

Or buy the pdf with illustrations from DrivethruRPG

ZTE Blade phone doodle digital art layers

By The Illustrator  |  2011/02/20 15:47 Posted in Illustration, ZTE Blade  |  Comments (0)
layers image for Illustration Friday

Layers

I just got a ZTE Blade mobile/cell phone, it’s actually what they call a smart phone, and the first thing I set it up for is painting. I downloaded an app from the Android Market called PaintJoy. This app has this strange bar which says click adds to donate and make the add bar go away, but no adds appear in it for me – I have the Internet pretty much turned off because I’m on a very cheap plan that only allows me 50MB of data per month. But apart from that it’s a great app, and it’s free.

I decided to do this week’s illustration for Illustration Friday on my new phone, (Here in Austria the ZTE Blade is called the Orange San Fransisco) and there are some disadvantages to trying to paint on a tiny little screen with a big fat finger like mine. The marks appear pretty much where you want them most of the time – but not exactly where you want them, and not all the time. PaintJoy has a nice undo button.

One solution to this problem might be to build or buy some kind of stylus for smart phones. I’ve seen pictures of a stylus created for an iPhone, and I don’t see any reason why the same trick couldn’t be performed for the ZTE Blade, as this mobile is known to everyone who isn’t with Orange.