Hugo Negron's Blog - Posts Tagged "dragon-magazine"
Upcoming interview!
Fun stuff comin'!
An awesome interview coming your way soon - some old time miniaturist collectors/fantasy gamers might recognize this talented illustrator/writer from some of his works as shown in the Grenadier Bulletin, the Polyhedron, and Dragon Magazine...here's a tease from a page of the old Grenadier Bulletin - one of my favorites from him - Croink the Rollin' Golem...!
An awesome interview coming your way soon - some old time miniaturist collectors/fantasy gamers might recognize this talented illustrator/writer from some of his works as shown in the Grenadier Bulletin, the Polyhedron, and Dragon Magazine...here's a tease from a page of the old Grenadier Bulletin - one of my favorites from him - Croink the Rollin' Golem...!
Interview with Ron Shirtz (Part One)!
As mentioned prior, an awesome interview with this talented illustrator/writer! From his work as shown in the Grenadier Bulletin, the Polyhedron, and Dragon Magazine (see attached some of my favorites from Ron taken from the pages of the old Grenadier Bulletin - Croink, the Rollin' Golem!), sit back and enjoy!
HN: Hi Ron – thanks again for taking the time to be interviewed! Let’s begin with telling us a little bit more about who Ron Shirtz is. How did you get into cartooning/illustration?
RS: Drawing runs in my family. My Dad showed some talent in his doodling. My older brother drew a lot, and I was inspired by his cartoons, though not as talented. I began doing cartoons of my Boy Scout troop, Church activities, and went on to draw a monthly strip, “Original Grin” for my High school newspaper. I enjoyed making people laugh.
HN: You’ve illustrated various cartoon strips, shown in both the old Grenadier Model’s Grenadier Bulletin and TSR’s fan mag the Polyhedron, among others. Some examples include The Knight Error, Croink, and Pennsylvania Smith. In addition, you have been involved in some RPG projects and created your RPG Tiles, which were famously shown in Dragon magazine. How did you develop your ideas for these?
A little background history... I've always admired the graphic components of the many RPG and wargames I’ve bought over the years. In fact, I'm usually sold on the graphic presentation of a game rather than the game system itself. I find the visual display of painted miniatures on colorful map sheets and game boards the coolest part of the gaming experience. When I bought a copy of the Milton Bradley game HeroQuest, and later Space Crusade, in 1998, I would not play either until I had all the miniatures painted!
In September of the same year I came across Dewayne Agin's HeroQuest website. On his site was a page devoted to downloadable game tiles for HeroQuest. Seeing this page sparked the desire to try my hand at making game board tiles. My first tiles were terrible, and thankfully forever digitally deleted. In the next two and a half years, I mastered the art of making tiles and eventually contributed over 100 full color game tiles to Dewayne's site.
Dewayne was very supportive in zipping the files and making new pages for the thumbnails to be posted. Many times I sent him a second or third version of a tile to replace the previous one that I discovered had minor errors. He cheerfully uploaded it to keep my sensitive artist ego happy. In 1999, at the suggestion of a HQ fan, I decided to try to market my tiles by offering a printing service for my tiles. Encouraged by the response, I created Working Stiff Productions.
Feeling confined with the standard 8" x 10" size format, I began making custom-sized 11" x 17" tiles. My next big break came when in October of 2000, the art director of Dragon magazine, Peter Whitley, reviewed a portfolio I had sent. He contracted me to do a series of five full color tile posters for five issues in the Dragon. Four posters tiles have been published in the issues 280-283. The last poster was to my knowledge never published. Perhaps it may yet appear in some future issue of the Dragon. Working for Dragon magazine helped me set higher standards for my tiles. Peter Whitley was very kind and helpful getting my work to fir a published format.
My work drew the attention of Mark H. Walker, of Shrapnel games. He commissioned me to do a set of game maps for his groundbreaking game, Forgotten Heroes: Vietnam. The 2003 August issue of PC Gamer gave Richard Caravan and I high marks (88%) for our artwork for the game. Richard designed the superb counters, and I did five full color maps. It was a great honor to hear the National Vietnam Veteran's Art museum had inducted the game into its art collection.
HN: What program do you use?
RS:Adobe Photoshop is my program of choice. I can’t speak on the merits of other image paint programs like Corel Draw or Canvas, but Photoshop has everything a 2D digital artist could ask for. Layers, special effects filters, dozens of art tools, and color adjusting features. I also used a plug in program called Alien Skin to create extra texture effects such as bevels, glows, wood textures, glass, fire, and many others. Back in the late 1990’s Photoshop was a ravenous pig that tapped all of the computer's resources. It would take all the RAM, hard drive space, and CPU speed you can give it, and still ask for more! Not that it freezes or crashes-- it is a very stable program. But when you are working on an 11” x 17” tile at 250 DPI, it will slow to crawl when applying a filter effect or performing a simple cut and paste.
Graphic images that physically large, at such high resolution, really tax a computer. When I first designed tiles for Dewayne's site, I was obliged to set them in 72 dpi resolution for easy file downloading. I slowly increased the resolution up to 100, to 125, to presently 250 dpi. The higher dpi gives beautifully detailed images, but at the cost of humongously large file sizes. Your printed piece will not be as sharp as compared to a 250 DPI one, but still look pretty good for gaming.
HN: Hi Ron – thanks again for taking the time to be interviewed! Let’s begin with telling us a little bit more about who Ron Shirtz is. How did you get into cartooning/illustration?
RS: Drawing runs in my family. My Dad showed some talent in his doodling. My older brother drew a lot, and I was inspired by his cartoons, though not as talented. I began doing cartoons of my Boy Scout troop, Church activities, and went on to draw a monthly strip, “Original Grin” for my High school newspaper. I enjoyed making people laugh.
HN: You’ve illustrated various cartoon strips, shown in both the old Grenadier Model’s Grenadier Bulletin and TSR’s fan mag the Polyhedron, among others. Some examples include The Knight Error, Croink, and Pennsylvania Smith. In addition, you have been involved in some RPG projects and created your RPG Tiles, which were famously shown in Dragon magazine. How did you develop your ideas for these?
A little background history... I've always admired the graphic components of the many RPG and wargames I’ve bought over the years. In fact, I'm usually sold on the graphic presentation of a game rather than the game system itself. I find the visual display of painted miniatures on colorful map sheets and game boards the coolest part of the gaming experience. When I bought a copy of the Milton Bradley game HeroQuest, and later Space Crusade, in 1998, I would not play either until I had all the miniatures painted!
In September of the same year I came across Dewayne Agin's HeroQuest website. On his site was a page devoted to downloadable game tiles for HeroQuest. Seeing this page sparked the desire to try my hand at making game board tiles. My first tiles were terrible, and thankfully forever digitally deleted. In the next two and a half years, I mastered the art of making tiles and eventually contributed over 100 full color game tiles to Dewayne's site.
Dewayne was very supportive in zipping the files and making new pages for the thumbnails to be posted. Many times I sent him a second or third version of a tile to replace the previous one that I discovered had minor errors. He cheerfully uploaded it to keep my sensitive artist ego happy. In 1999, at the suggestion of a HQ fan, I decided to try to market my tiles by offering a printing service for my tiles. Encouraged by the response, I created Working Stiff Productions.
Feeling confined with the standard 8" x 10" size format, I began making custom-sized 11" x 17" tiles. My next big break came when in October of 2000, the art director of Dragon magazine, Peter Whitley, reviewed a portfolio I had sent. He contracted me to do a series of five full color tile posters for five issues in the Dragon. Four posters tiles have been published in the issues 280-283. The last poster was to my knowledge never published. Perhaps it may yet appear in some future issue of the Dragon. Working for Dragon magazine helped me set higher standards for my tiles. Peter Whitley was very kind and helpful getting my work to fir a published format.
My work drew the attention of Mark H. Walker, of Shrapnel games. He commissioned me to do a set of game maps for his groundbreaking game, Forgotten Heroes: Vietnam. The 2003 August issue of PC Gamer gave Richard Caravan and I high marks (88%) for our artwork for the game. Richard designed the superb counters, and I did five full color maps. It was a great honor to hear the National Vietnam Veteran's Art museum had inducted the game into its art collection.
HN: What program do you use?
RS:Adobe Photoshop is my program of choice. I can’t speak on the merits of other image paint programs like Corel Draw or Canvas, but Photoshop has everything a 2D digital artist could ask for. Layers, special effects filters, dozens of art tools, and color adjusting features. I also used a plug in program called Alien Skin to create extra texture effects such as bevels, glows, wood textures, glass, fire, and many others. Back in the late 1990’s Photoshop was a ravenous pig that tapped all of the computer's resources. It would take all the RAM, hard drive space, and CPU speed you can give it, and still ask for more! Not that it freezes or crashes-- it is a very stable program. But when you are working on an 11” x 17” tile at 250 DPI, it will slow to crawl when applying a filter effect or performing a simple cut and paste.
Graphic images that physically large, at such high resolution, really tax a computer. When I first designed tiles for Dewayne's site, I was obliged to set them in 72 dpi resolution for easy file downloading. I slowly increased the resolution up to 100, to 125, to presently 250 dpi. The higher dpi gives beautifully detailed images, but at the cost of humongously large file sizes. Your printed piece will not be as sharp as compared to a 250 DPI one, but still look pretty good for gaming.
Interview with Ron Shirtz (Part Two)!
Continuing the conversation with Ron Shirtz from Part One...
HN: How long does it take?
RS: Depending on the complexity of the tile, whether it’s just a dungeon floor or a decorated room, anywhere from 1-5 hours for an 8”x 10” size tile. High-tech tiles take more time as they required lots of nuts, bolts, buttons, etc. Larger (11” x 17”) tiles are ten times longer to make. It took 40 plus hours to create the Space Freighter tile set, “Brandy’s Lament”. I was pretty burned out after making that one. It was several weeks before I would even consider making another tile!
HN: How do you achieve such realistic effects?
RS: Using a combination of design techniques and clip art photos I can achieve a near photo-realistic effect with many of my tiles. Clip art saves me considerable time from having to design sub-components for many tiles. But using clip art effectively is more than just cut and paste---much of the clip art I use has to be resized, cropped, trimmed, flipped, rotated, distorted, and otherwise modified to fit the scale and colors of a tile. I spend a lot of time researching hundreds of clip art files to find one to suit my purpose. But while I make use of stock photo clip art, the majority of my tiles are created ex nihilo in Photoshop. The real key in making realistic tiles is the use of lighting. Highlights and shadows give depth and drama to artwork. Using Photoshop’s layers, blur filters, dodge and burn tools I can create lighting effects to make the tile more dramatic. Adding texture overlays also enhances the finished product. These texture overlays can be imported and blended in at different levels of transparency to really set off a stone floor and other tile elements. Keeping the tiles to 25mm scale can be tricky--I keep a 25mm miniature next to my computer compare against the tile on the monitor to help keep the tiles in reasonably close to scale. Even so, I often fudge with the scale to make items on the tiles bigger than life for dramatic effect--- I used the excuse of artistic license more than once to justify my errors in keeping scale!
HN: Where do you get your ideas for tiles?
RS: Mostly movies & comics. I take a cinematic approach to my work. Among my favorite artists are N.C. Wyeth, M.C. Escher, the Brothers Hildebrandt, and Jack "King" Kirby. A lot of the old adventure movies from the 1960's give me inspiration for themes to make tiles. The idea for the "Crocodile pit" tile was from an old Tarzan movie I saw as a kid. Nowadays when I watch a movie I spend more time watching the scenery and the sets than the actors! Sometimes I get ideas from studying photos of historical buildings and structures from the past. The tricky part is making the idea translate into a top-down perspective on a tile. I often approach the design of a tile as if I am building a stage for the action to take place. I often add obstacles, pathways, different elevations, and other features to make a tile unique, and to give challenges for a party of adventurers to overcome. My goal is always to make a tile evoke mystery or drama. I like to think that my tiles often tell a story by themselves, giving the GM ideas for running an adventure.
A final bit of advice: Don't be too discouraged if your first attempts don't come out very well the first time. (Then again, you may be a natural born artist and whip out masterpieces on the first try--I've seen it happen!) If anyone saw my first tiles I did three years ago, you would have thought they were pretty pathetic. It wasn't till my second year I started to turn out some decent ones, and by the third year I was finally good enough to get Dragon Magazine's attention to publish my work. Even then, it wasn't until my last two tiles in the poster series that I begin to hit my stride. You must decide if you are going for masterpieces, or just some nice, useful tiles for gaming-- It can be a toss up to decide which would you rather do ----gaming or making tiles! Live with your choice and don't compare your work with others unless you are going for masterpieces. I make tiles because I enjoy it, (or getting decent bucks to do it!) The minute making a tile seems like work is when I wrap it up and call it a night. It's gotta be fun to be worth doing.
HN: Which of your works is your favorite? What characters were the most fun to develop? Which were the most challenging?
RS: I would say all have been my favorite. Each one engaged my imagination in a new way. One thing I learned is that there is always another story or picture to be made. So whenever I’m asked, which my best work is, I say “The next one”.
As far as the most challenging, I would say the map boards for Forgotten Heroes, Vietnam. Lots of detail, and I had to make sure all the geomorphic maps would align with one another regardless of their orientation. Every hex had to be given a reference number.
HN: What are your plans long-term? Do you have additional/different works in mind?
RS: None really. I pick up the odd job here and there. I’ve shifted gears and now concentrating on writing my first book, a sci-fi adventure titled: The Last voyage of the Brandy’s Lament.
HN: As an author, it’s sometimes difficult to finally say a product is finished, no matter how many times you review or edit. Is there anything you would go back and change from your creations? Where there ideas you had in mind and then decided NOT to include?
RS: Oh yes. I rarely had a project that I did not wish I could revise after it was published. Can’t tell you the number of times that the day after I submit a project that the muse pays me a tardy visit and THEN tells me what I should have done instead! But when up against a deadline, one seldom has the luxury to mess about multiple versions. It’s often “Gotta get ‘er done!” “Publish or Perish!”
Often I wished I had added some more features here or there, or emphasized some of the elements. Composition is the key. I like to design my layouts asymmetrically to create dynamic angles and poses, while ensuing it is balanced and not ready to fall over.
HN: I have a 5 year old son, and structuring time around him can be challenging! I’ve lost count of the times he nearly pressed the delete button on something I was working on…how do you find time to develop your projects?
RS: Heh. Usually forging sleep, and working in the wee hours. Or getting up early. Makes for being a zombie for the rest of the day, but one must suffer for one’s art.
I’m paranoid about backing up my work. One time I invested 40 hours designing some HeroQuest RPG floor tiles, and blew off backing them up. Of course Murphy ’s Law kicked in, as my computer decided to pick up a virus and I lost everything. Oh, the pain! Never again. I vowed.
HN: Do you have a certain method you use – i.e., a certain room, music, mood, etc., to help get you in the right creative frame of mind?
RS: Not really. Sometime I do listen to music. But usually ideas come to me when I waiting somewhere, or attending a boring, purposeless meeting. My co-workers will see me scribbling furiously, thinking I am dutifully taking notes, when instead I’m doing thumbnail sketches of future projects.
HN: What are you working on right now?
RS: Nothing at the moment. I’m currently working on my first novel, a sci-fi adventure titled: The Last Voyage of the Brandy’s Lament. Boy, do I now have a greater appreciation of authors! The book is currently in its 17 month of gestation, and I have at least another 4-6 weeks to go to finish revising the original draft.
The rest of my time is spent on my favorite hobby, painting miniatures and creating tabletop scenery. I find it very therapeutic, if nothing else. I’m a terrible gamer as far as strategy and tactics go. I seldom ever win. But I do love the visual pageantry of miniatures displayed on a scenic game board.
HN: Where can readers go to find out more about Ron Shirtz?
RS: Well, I do have a Facebook page, but I am very shy to share much about myself. But Google Dwayne Agin’s Hero Quest page, or my name, and examples of my early RPG tiles can be found and available free for downloading.
HN: How long does it take?
RS: Depending on the complexity of the tile, whether it’s just a dungeon floor or a decorated room, anywhere from 1-5 hours for an 8”x 10” size tile. High-tech tiles take more time as they required lots of nuts, bolts, buttons, etc. Larger (11” x 17”) tiles are ten times longer to make. It took 40 plus hours to create the Space Freighter tile set, “Brandy’s Lament”. I was pretty burned out after making that one. It was several weeks before I would even consider making another tile!
HN: How do you achieve such realistic effects?
RS: Using a combination of design techniques and clip art photos I can achieve a near photo-realistic effect with many of my tiles. Clip art saves me considerable time from having to design sub-components for many tiles. But using clip art effectively is more than just cut and paste---much of the clip art I use has to be resized, cropped, trimmed, flipped, rotated, distorted, and otherwise modified to fit the scale and colors of a tile. I spend a lot of time researching hundreds of clip art files to find one to suit my purpose. But while I make use of stock photo clip art, the majority of my tiles are created ex nihilo in Photoshop. The real key in making realistic tiles is the use of lighting. Highlights and shadows give depth and drama to artwork. Using Photoshop’s layers, blur filters, dodge and burn tools I can create lighting effects to make the tile more dramatic. Adding texture overlays also enhances the finished product. These texture overlays can be imported and blended in at different levels of transparency to really set off a stone floor and other tile elements. Keeping the tiles to 25mm scale can be tricky--I keep a 25mm miniature next to my computer compare against the tile on the monitor to help keep the tiles in reasonably close to scale. Even so, I often fudge with the scale to make items on the tiles bigger than life for dramatic effect--- I used the excuse of artistic license more than once to justify my errors in keeping scale!
HN: Where do you get your ideas for tiles?
RS: Mostly movies & comics. I take a cinematic approach to my work. Among my favorite artists are N.C. Wyeth, M.C. Escher, the Brothers Hildebrandt, and Jack "King" Kirby. A lot of the old adventure movies from the 1960's give me inspiration for themes to make tiles. The idea for the "Crocodile pit" tile was from an old Tarzan movie I saw as a kid. Nowadays when I watch a movie I spend more time watching the scenery and the sets than the actors! Sometimes I get ideas from studying photos of historical buildings and structures from the past. The tricky part is making the idea translate into a top-down perspective on a tile. I often approach the design of a tile as if I am building a stage for the action to take place. I often add obstacles, pathways, different elevations, and other features to make a tile unique, and to give challenges for a party of adventurers to overcome. My goal is always to make a tile evoke mystery or drama. I like to think that my tiles often tell a story by themselves, giving the GM ideas for running an adventure.
A final bit of advice: Don't be too discouraged if your first attempts don't come out very well the first time. (Then again, you may be a natural born artist and whip out masterpieces on the first try--I've seen it happen!) If anyone saw my first tiles I did three years ago, you would have thought they were pretty pathetic. It wasn't till my second year I started to turn out some decent ones, and by the third year I was finally good enough to get Dragon Magazine's attention to publish my work. Even then, it wasn't until my last two tiles in the poster series that I begin to hit my stride. You must decide if you are going for masterpieces, or just some nice, useful tiles for gaming-- It can be a toss up to decide which would you rather do ----gaming or making tiles! Live with your choice and don't compare your work with others unless you are going for masterpieces. I make tiles because I enjoy it, (or getting decent bucks to do it!) The minute making a tile seems like work is when I wrap it up and call it a night. It's gotta be fun to be worth doing.
HN: Which of your works is your favorite? What characters were the most fun to develop? Which were the most challenging?
RS: I would say all have been my favorite. Each one engaged my imagination in a new way. One thing I learned is that there is always another story or picture to be made. So whenever I’m asked, which my best work is, I say “The next one”.
As far as the most challenging, I would say the map boards for Forgotten Heroes, Vietnam. Lots of detail, and I had to make sure all the geomorphic maps would align with one another regardless of their orientation. Every hex had to be given a reference number.
HN: What are your plans long-term? Do you have additional/different works in mind?
RS: None really. I pick up the odd job here and there. I’ve shifted gears and now concentrating on writing my first book, a sci-fi adventure titled: The Last voyage of the Brandy’s Lament.
HN: As an author, it’s sometimes difficult to finally say a product is finished, no matter how many times you review or edit. Is there anything you would go back and change from your creations? Where there ideas you had in mind and then decided NOT to include?
RS: Oh yes. I rarely had a project that I did not wish I could revise after it was published. Can’t tell you the number of times that the day after I submit a project that the muse pays me a tardy visit and THEN tells me what I should have done instead! But when up against a deadline, one seldom has the luxury to mess about multiple versions. It’s often “Gotta get ‘er done!” “Publish or Perish!”
Often I wished I had added some more features here or there, or emphasized some of the elements. Composition is the key. I like to design my layouts asymmetrically to create dynamic angles and poses, while ensuing it is balanced and not ready to fall over.
HN: I have a 5 year old son, and structuring time around him can be challenging! I’ve lost count of the times he nearly pressed the delete button on something I was working on…how do you find time to develop your projects?
RS: Heh. Usually forging sleep, and working in the wee hours. Or getting up early. Makes for being a zombie for the rest of the day, but one must suffer for one’s art.
I’m paranoid about backing up my work. One time I invested 40 hours designing some HeroQuest RPG floor tiles, and blew off backing them up. Of course Murphy ’s Law kicked in, as my computer decided to pick up a virus and I lost everything. Oh, the pain! Never again. I vowed.
HN: Do you have a certain method you use – i.e., a certain room, music, mood, etc., to help get you in the right creative frame of mind?
RS: Not really. Sometime I do listen to music. But usually ideas come to me when I waiting somewhere, or attending a boring, purposeless meeting. My co-workers will see me scribbling furiously, thinking I am dutifully taking notes, when instead I’m doing thumbnail sketches of future projects.
HN: What are you working on right now?
RS: Nothing at the moment. I’m currently working on my first novel, a sci-fi adventure titled: The Last Voyage of the Brandy’s Lament. Boy, do I now have a greater appreciation of authors! The book is currently in its 17 month of gestation, and I have at least another 4-6 weeks to go to finish revising the original draft.
The rest of my time is spent on my favorite hobby, painting miniatures and creating tabletop scenery. I find it very therapeutic, if nothing else. I’m a terrible gamer as far as strategy and tactics go. I seldom ever win. But I do love the visual pageantry of miniatures displayed on a scenic game board.
HN: Where can readers go to find out more about Ron Shirtz?
RS: Well, I do have a Facebook page, but I am very shy to share much about myself. But Google Dwayne Agin’s Hero Quest page, or my name, and examples of my early RPG tiles can be found and available free for downloading.
