Dragons and Doodles

If you follow my site, you know I am a gamer, and role playing games are my jam. Pathfinder is one my favorites but I've been starting to play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. Now on Sunday nights I am playing a D&D game on Roll20, a platform for playing online so we don't have to juggle our schedules to get together.

If you are interested in playing Pathfinder or D&D, I highly recommend playing in person. You get a lot more involved in the story telling and it's easier to stay focused. But if your group members are in different states, or too far apart even locally to get together easily, Roll20 is a solid alternative. The only problem I've had is staying focused. If we're at a table and another person is taking time with their action, I can easily look at my character sheet or rule book and stay pretty focused in the game. (side note: I HATE it when people are texting during games.) When you are playing online, however, it's really easy to get distracted when it isn't your turn. Facebook, Twitter, NYTimes; they are all just clicks away.

But now I've finally nailed a way to stay focused in game: doodles.

A lot of my doodles are about the game. But most of them are me just scribbling out whatever pops into my head on sticky notes. I got the idea of sticky notes from an online illustration class. The artist does all of his first sketches on sticky notes, scans them and then traces them in Illustrator for his final composition! It definitely takes the stress out of trying to make a "finished" drawing. I'm going to go out and buy a giant pack of stickies and just keep doodling.

I manage to doodle two blocks (12 sticky notes) of drawings each 3 hour chunk of game play. These were all done with a mechanical pencil.

I have a model of a sand person sitting on my desk, that's how he sneaked in there.