Rory’s Story Cubes!

A friend of mine has developed an excellent creativity tool called Rory’s Story Cubes. Rory’s Story Cubes is a dice game/tool that helps people of all ages to develop their imagination and creativity through improvisational storytelling. It is comprised of set of 9 6-sided dice with a total of 54 unique images/symbols.

I asked some of my talented and generous illustrator friends to test them out to see how/if they can be useful tool. Brian Gallagher was one such illustrator. He has also agreed to show us the process he used to create the above image.

Over to you Brian…

I was asked to take a random sequence of the dice and turn it into an illustration. This is how it worked out for me…

I began first by doodling a few ideas out in my note books, then added in features that came to me from the symbols.

Once I’d done a sketch that seemed to be going somewhere, I felt the composition was too central so added some more elements at the sides. I then transferred the drawing to a piece of black scraperboard using blue carbon paper below my taped down sketch and went over it with a biro.

To begin with I generally line out as much of the board as possible with a single tool and take away a bit more of the white areas as I go along. You have to be careful not to rub out the carbon paper’s line with the side of your palm as this is very easy to do.

To prevent this happening I wear a fine white cotton glove with the thumb and first two fingers cut off. This helps reduce the moisture from your drawing/engraving hand erasing the line and also helps prevent smudging the white areas. The problem is the fine dust created from scraping the ink is water soluble and will make a mess if the humidity from your hand mixes with it.

I use about four different tools when working, from a single point to a multiple point etching engraver. It’s then a case of patiently working away removing and assessing the tone as you go along.

Finally I coloured up the image using two layers in PhotoShop.

To buy or find out more about Rory’s Cubes visit www.thecreativityhub.com

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Illustration, Resources, Step-by-steps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.