Penguins & Princesses & Project Updates

sam mameli July 6, 2023

This blog post is going to mostly be recommendations, with a couple of project updates!

Recommendations

So if you’re into small press RPG’s (I know you are because you’re reading this) you need to check out Space Penguin Ink- Officially launching today, SPI is the brainchild of Jarret Crader, who is leading a bunch of excellent folks in the indie TTRPG scene.

Space Penguin Ink

The store is launching with 2 mothership adventures, a Troika adventure, A Mork Borg adventure and a DCC adventure- basically a cross section of the most fun indie ttrpg games around. For those of you who don't know, Jarret used to be the project manager at Exalted Funeral, and he has more or less been responsible for some aspect of almost every cool book in RPG land for the last 10 years or so.

Another quick recommendation- If you enjoy the Palace of the Silver Princess, you may be interested to check out this reorganization of it for Cairn done by David Blandy & Richard Markert. It’s a solid way to enjoy a classic adventure that does a few things I especially like-

-Leans into the Zelda-like setting (in a few ways I hadn’t even considered)

-prunes the blocks of texts into highly parseable language for the table

-Combines some of the best aspects of both the orange and green covers to create a better overall story

-understands the importance of Travis

Consider picking it up and tossing them a few bucks.

Palace of the Silver Princess Cairn Edition

Some Project Updates:

I’m still accepting commission requests for my BIG CHARACTER COMMISSION SALE, and I think I will be until the end of the month or so. My car shit the bed the other day and I’m still waiting to hear back as to the extent of the repair costs (which may be great enough that it might be time to put the old girl to bed and get something new). Either way I’ll be needing some extra cash. The deal is still:

$75 USD ($70 for current Patreon subs) for a character commission (doesn’t have to be an rpg character per say, I’m currently working on a piece memorializing someones old Dark Age of Camelot character- so sick)

If you’re interested you can shoot me an email at Sdmameli@gmail.com

The first issue of Better Legends Friends & Foes is trucking along, we have reached the point where I have to write things and those familiar with my process will know that is the SLOW part of any project for me. But I predict it will be done soon and available for free to patrons and for a small cost to everyone else. This will be digital only for now, as I think I’ll wait until I’ve done a few issues before I combine them into something physical.

The first chapter of my 18+ erotic adventure comic, Island Vacation is nearly done as well! The last page of the first chapter is being posted for my Patrons today and the full version should be ready for general consumption in not that long (hopefully even physical copies of that one!) if you’re interested in any of my NSFW stuff, you can find it over on my Patreon at the $10 tier.

Dungeon23

I am struggling. I think the six month mark may be the last of this project, but that is not set in stone. I have gotten farther than I have with any daily practice project that I’ve done before, which I am extremely proud of. We’ll see what the next few weeks hold and if I manage to dig myself out of a 10 or 11 day idea drought. It would really be something to end it on this:

That's all for now! Thanks for reading.

-Skullboy (Sam)

Taking a Sketch and Making it a Risograph Print

sam mameli May 2, 2023

I recently just finished a Risograph print! I love the way that it turned out and so far the response has been really good. I figured it might be nice to break down the start to finish process for folks that aren’t familiar.

I started sketching in Procreate. This is a new setup for me (my sister gifted me her old iPad for Christmas since she doesn’t use it anymore) and I’ve really started to enjoy the freedom of being able to work away from my desk without having to worry about things like scanning, paper, erasers, lots of supplies etc. Digital drawing is something I’ve been doing for about 10 years now, and this is my first foray into working directly on a screen, the tablet I use is an Intuos 4 from 2009 so I’m finally kicking and dragging myself into the 21st century.

The sketch is rough but it gets the point across for what I need figured out first, which is pose and silhouette.

After the sketch layer I switch brushes to something closer to a pencil and start figuring out what everything is ACTUALLY going to look like.

After the pencil lines are done I finalize everything with a ink layer. Normally this would be separate line/shadow layers but Risograph prints are color layer based. So everything that’s going to be black has to be on the same layer, and I just do the shadows at a different opacity to they look grey.

Colors are the next step! Risograph print shops each have a list of the colors that they use on their website, I love this, because working under a restricted palette builds character. Here were my choices at Lucky Risograph. I went with them because they are fairly close by and I had seen some artists I like use them before.

I’ve always been a big sucker for CMYK printing (which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Key/Black) So I chose Black, Cornflower Blue, Sunflower Yellow & Bright Red. This gives me basically infinite flexibility in my palette through the use of opacity and color blending. Now I get to experiment with how everything looks for a while. I switch from the iPad and Procreate over to Clip Studio Paint on my PC and I start playing around with layers and opacity.

They don’t look like much without the black layer, but you can see a bit of how I got various color combos out of the yellow, blue & red.

It’s important to keep your layers separate here. The file you send to your printer should have 1 layer per color used.

after that I email my file to the printer, get a quote for the print and pay! I decide the kind of paper I want it printed on based specifically on the fact that I need to roll these into a tube to mail them. We decide on 80lb Via Vellum in Bright White.

Then I play the nervous waiting game while I wait for them to tell me that the job is done and it’s on it’s way! They sent me this picture to make sure everything looks how I want it to, and it arrived a few days later!

Lot's of Updates!

sam mameli April 13, 2023

April’s almost half over! Here’s some things I’ve been working on.

If you haven’t checked out the Bridgetown Kickstarter yet you should- they managed to secure funding in a single day, and for good reason! It’s a really cool setting and I’m excited to be a part of it. I think the best Troika stuff takes a simple concept and digs really deep into it, fleshing out all of the nooks and crannies. Bridgetown manages this nicely and I think the setting would make for a really good mini-series style campaign. I like that length of game, it gives you a couple of sessions to build out your characters, while not scaring off folks that might not want to try and commit to the classic “once a week forever” style game that are often sought after, but incredibly rare.

the map is my latest foray into the Where’s Waldo/ Richard Scarry style of artmaking.

My band, Teencat, has a new shirt that just arrived today! It’s printed by the fine folks at Night Owls Printshop and I can’t recommend them enough! They did an amazing job. Thanks again to everyone who helped out with the preorder, I’ll definitely be doing more shirts in the future both band and non-band related. I’ll have a new store page up for these by next week, once we get all of the inventory processed and the preorders shipped.

In the realm of personal projects I’ve started streaming again- Friday mornings around 10am EDT (emphasis on the around, but if you follow my social media I always post when I go live)

I decided it would be fun to re-draw some of the characters I made for the Patreon and started with Jorda Mulgoan. She’s featured prominently in this adventure as well

This quickly turned into a much larger endeavor as I’m going to be putting them together into a book. The plan is to have them statted for OSE/Moldvay Basic characters and easy to drop into an ongoing campaign. I’ll be posting them on my Patreon as the project moves forward.

I’m currently waiting to see proofs on my newest print, The Dragonslayer. This 4 color risograph will be available in my store soon! It features my wife, slaying the big dragon of medical debt. Do you know about the big dragon of medical debt? I bet you do if you also have a chronic illness and a bunch of your revenue goes towards medical supplies. It’s incredibly frustrating to interact with the American healthcare system and unfortunately the only bullet I have in my gun to combat anything is artmaking. All money made from the print will be spent on diabetic equipment, so if you like artwork featuring nice young women killing big monsters- this might just be the perfect print for you.

I’m also working on my first comic! I’ve been wanting to make one for ages, but something about the form eluded me. I guess something changed though because I currently have about 16 pages mapped out for the first chapter of this story. I’m having a blast, and currently dropping a page a week on Thursdays for my DungeonXDungeon Patrons Subbing at that level of my patreon gets you the comic as it releases, along with a number of other erotic illustrations in the backlog.

Freelancers: A Crossroads Game

sam mameli April 5, 2023

I’ve spent the last year working on illustrations for a board game! It’s called Freelancers, and is a sequel to the game Forgotten Waters. I thought it might be cool to post some of the in progress shots from the project. There are a TON of my pieces in it, and I’ll post some more here, and on my Instagram over the next few weeks.

A lot of the work I did was character design. Here’s some process shots of a few of them. Starting with Trent, a Treant hireling you can meet in your travels.

This guy definitely has a name but all my files just say “Troll” so you’ll have to buy the game to learn what he’s actually called. Despite not being on a first name basis with him though he was one of my favorites to draw.