{"id":4042,"date":"2012-04-13T16:29:45","date_gmt":"2012-04-13T20:29:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=4042"},"modified":"2012-04-13T17:08:20","modified_gmt":"2012-04-13T21:08:20","slug":"an-alphabeasts-farewell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=4042","title":{"rendered":"An AlphaBeasts Farewell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yep, that’s right–my Monster Manual<\/em>s, Fiend Folio<\/em>, etc. have all been put back on the shelf… because, as of yesterday, I’ve now completed all 26 letters of the AlphaBeasts project. The project was a real blast start to finish and I’m surely going to miss my regular Friday late-night ritual of rifling through my old TSR books to select a beast to work on throughout the weekend. More than that, though, I’m going to miss seeing the amazing array of creatures that start streaming out via Twitter<\/a> and Google+<\/a> in the wee hours of Monday morning.<\/p>\n

I’m hard-pressed to narrow down a few samples of the most impressive complete alphabets from participants, but here are just a few off the top of my head: I loved this elegantly drawn and whimsical alphabet from Amalgamated Biscuit<\/a>.\u00a0 Project captain and tumblr-er extraordinaire Andrew Neal<\/a> wound up with a really great-looking gray-toned\/screen-toned alphabet. Caitlin Lehman<\/a>‘s stuff is just mind-blowing. Christian Sager<\/a>‘s alphabet really stood out to me as far as breadth and depth of concept goes. EC Steiner<\/a>‘s work is absolutely gorgeous. Henry Eudy<\/a>‘s alphabet displays both his amazing sense color and of humor. In addition to some pretty great drawings, Isaac Cates<\/a>‘s blog posts for each entry were a highlight of the project. Joey Weiser<\/a> turned in one of the best themed sets of the project. Jonathan Rosenbaum<\/a>‘s drawings were both beautifully-drawn and often hilarious. Kelly Williams<\/a>‘s combination of beautiful line-work, ink wash, and spot color was something I looked forward to every Monday. Leah Palmer Preiss<\/a> produced a beautiful themed set of beasts incorporating found snippets of vintage books, magazines, and newspapers. Lupi McGinty’s<\/a> watercolors were beautiful–and with her kid, AZ, thrown into the mix, they’d often turn in three or four beasts per letter. Sam Wolk’s<\/a> beasts were always impressive, often showing off some amazing hatching technique.<\/p>\n

I could go on picking out alphabets that I like for a while–and there are some pretty impressive nearly-complete ones that’ll likely get wrapped up soon, like Rich Barret’s<\/a>–but it’d be easier for you to just go to the AlphaBeasts tumblr and check it out for yourself:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/alphabeasts.tumblr.com<\/a><\/p>\n

My Beasts:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I decided to take all of my beasts from a single source: Dungeons & Dragons. In retrospect, I think this was probably not a great idea, since for each beast I basically just wound up doing my own “rewrite” of the single published D&D image for each creature. As a whole, though, they’re not a bad-looking bunch of creatures. Here’s a full picassa gallery of them A-Z:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>(Click through the image for the full gallery)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Note that there are still some good originals for sale at my web store<\/a>. $12.00 cheap!<\/p>\n

And, of course, stay tuned for AlphaBooks…. coming soon!<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yep, that’s right–my Monster Manuals, Fiend Folio, etc. have all been put back on the shelf… because, as of yesterday, I’ve now completed all 26 letters of the AlphaBeasts project. The project was a real blast start to finish and I’m surely going to miss my regular Friday late-night ritual of rifling through my old … <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p46veT-13c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4042"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4042"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4055,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4042\/revisions\/4055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}