This is a weird page, and drawing isometric stuff is harder than I thought it would be.

The picture is supposed to be a simplified model of the base, like a LIDAR scan, not a photograph. Chimyriad is hanging her commandeered phone out a window and passing it back and forth a few times and… I guess the phone has a “construct isometric model” app or something. Or hell, maybe she found a drawer with early plans roughed out and snapped a shot.

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I have a book series recommendation. I’ve developed a bad habit lately of starting a new series, and 15% of the way though the first book it’s not for me. That’s fine by itself, but I’m currently 3 for 3 with coming back a year later and giving it another shot and deciding it’s my favorite series in a long time. Part of it is simple timing, and part of it comes from trying to read the book, then when I return to the series, its because I’m looking for a new audiobook to fill my ears while I draw. It’s not that I’m a lazy reader, but the need for content I can multitask to helps me get past the “establishing phase” of books which is usually my least favorite part.

Anyway, the series is probably something you heavier readers have heard of, called “Expeditionary Force,” the first book of which is titled “Columbus Day.” In some ways, the first book is structured a bit like the movie “From Dusk till Dawn.” If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s a fairly straightforward “bank robbers on the run filled with Tarantino-esque dialog,” and then out of nowhere and without any foreshadowing, the third act is like “You know what? Fuck it. Vampires!” I wish more media had the balls to pull a crazy move like that, but the money people are always going to be worried about burning their existing audience. Expeditionary Force doesn’t have anything to do with Vampires, there’s just a fairly dramatic change of circumstances about 2/3 of the way through the first book. It starts off as the very opposite of a HFY story, which is usually not my speed, but… eh, I don’t want to spoil anything, I’ll just say the series become sort of a master class in lateral thinking. I just finished book 13, and by then… it’s… kind of a HFY story? Not really but… arg! It’s good. I recommend it, and I especially recommend the audiobooks, because the narrator does a fantastic job with the main characters. The only caveat I’ll give is the that the whole story is incredibly high stakes, like it starts at “if we screw up, humanity will go extinct,” and it only gets worse from there. 13 books of that (actually 15, I’m still working through it) is a little stressful, there were times I felt like having a palate cleanser with a Robert Asprin book or something, but I was still compelled to forge ahead with the next book.

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The November Vote Incentive is up!

I went a little simpler with the art this time, which is to say I didn’t add like 9 passes of lighting and detail work. I wasn’t trying to chintz out on the time input or anything, I’d been browsing around ArtStation since I like torturing myself with all the amazing art there, and found a few people who do nice clean styles that are more Arcane (the League of Legends Netflix show) than Love, Death and Robots, and by LD&R I mean the ones that are like “Look at how realistic our skin textures are!” and not the ones that are more Pixar-y or just like 2D cell art or whatever.

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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.