Scrapyard Style

Welcome to the next episode of “Conquering Perfectionism.” I’m your host, contestant, director, producer, and proud audience member: Sam.

A piece of advice I’ve been given about being a perfectionist is to try new things. Revisit the process of sucking and getting better over and over. So I’ve been making art.

Also, as I’ve been saying, I’m just gonna go for it and do it badly.

Last time, I made some art. It felt good to build some momentum.

Then I discovered two things: DungeonCraft and Scrap Princess.

Professor Dungeon Master of DungeonCraft came up in my recommended on YouTube. Now, it’s not a surprise that a channel like his came up for me. What’s surprising is that YouTube recommended gave me something good. After watching a recent video on killing more characters, I found myself flipping through quite a few more of them. His style is certainly more old-school than most DnD 5e fans. I feel at times the DnD label can just be used as a Trojan horse to the gamer mind, which is what he seems to be going for.

Certainly, his videos pulled me towards the “Gritty” polarity of adventure gaming.

I also saw Scrap Princess’s art, which I was familiar with from Tomb of the Serpent Kings, the best introductory dungeon known to man. I was watching a Questing Beast review of Fire on the Velvet Horizon (also Scrap’s work).

Fire On The Velvet Horizon - False Machine Publishing | DriveThruRPG.com — Cover. See more on the Monster Manual Sewn From Pants blog

scrap princess omega (@SCRAP_PRUNCESS) | Twitter

Then I noticed how approachable that art style is:

It only takes some black pens, really. Any other colors are just flair.
It allows for mistakes. You can always just put more ink on the page.
It has a high skill-cap.
It is FANTASTIC for monsters. Nothing is *quite* recognizable. The shapelessness of things leave more to the imagination.

It lines up with my goals rather perfectly:

I’m cheap and not too good at finding art materials.
I’m on a path to making more mistakes as a noobie and for the sake of catharsis.
I want to get better at art, having never taken an art class beyond 5th grade.
I like monsters.

I call it “Scrapyard Style” in honor of Scrap. I’m not sure what I’ve done with it, if anything.

I got excited and posted about artpunkin’ the cover of Maze Rats.

Here it is (both sides this time):