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Friday, September 23, 2011

Silhouettes - Taking Stock

Okay, I have at least passing silhouettes for 42 of the 77 monsters found in Original D&D's wilderness encounter charts.  That's more than half way!

I actually have tried lions twice, and stegosaurus twice, but the source pictures weren't very good and the resulting silhouettes just didn't seem good enough.  There are tons of beetle pics from directly above but I'm looking for an action shot like the ant, crab, and spider.  I think I finally found an image for iconic nomads.

I've mentioned before that the humanoids will be difficult.  If you put a gun to my head I'd make some shields with different totemic images to represent their tribes.

Some of the remainder are pretty classic mythological creatures but I haven't been able to find representations of them that give a crisp, recognizable silhouette.
 
I actually forgot that I started out just trying to provide images for creatures encountered in the wilderness.   I started thinking my list was all the monsters.  But the Monsters & Treasures book also has some dungeon monsters:
  • Lycanthropes (4)
  • Purple worms
  • Invisible stalkers (haha, that one's done)
  • Elementals (4)
  • Djinn
  • Efreet
  • Ochre Jelly
  • Black Pudding
  • Green Slime
  • Gray Ooze
  • Yellow Mold
  • Medium/Heavy/Draft horse (I have the medium)
  • Mule (I have this)
  • Small insects
  • Large Insects

So if I expand my project to include them, the various puddings will be challenging to say the least.  I could do the were-creatures by placing human figures next to the animal shapes, but that's not the Hollywood-type wolfman.  The rest seem doable.  This brings the total to 44 out of 100 creatures.  That's not quite half way.

As for character-type silhouettes, I know that I have a real dearth of females and have actively been looking for some.

I know that the actually work I'm doing is pretty crude (if there's artistry it's recognizing the pictures that will yield the most iconic silhouettes) but it's cool to think I'm plinking away at the same image, blown up to 800%, that Aubrey Beardsley or one of the other great illustrators was stooped over so many, many years ago.

2 comments:

  1. This is a cool project, and I hope that I've expressed my appreciation before. You're a Telemensch.

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  2. Thank you very much. I'm hoping it will be useful to folks and that someday I'll see campaign maps with these fellers on them.

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