More doodles from a D&D notebook

A couple of faces from the margins made while playing Dungeons and Dragons

1/17/2005

6/6/2005

Lesson learned: using ‘tomorrow’ as a date for a queued post can have unexpected results if you edit that post after midnight

Continuing the vampire theme from yesterday, an old doodle of Batboy. 6/7/2001

Just a little Nosferatu doodled while working on my taxes. 3/28/2011

Only doodle in a black moleskine I found in a box of papers. 3/27/2007 Yeah, sitting there unused for 4 years. Why do I waste money like this?

Now, this is a handlebar mustache. 11/6/2010

A beholder, which was the name of the ship we were on. 11/6/2010

I was thinking about the Burgess Shale between 2/6/2010 & 2/13/2010

More organic designs from D&D night, and evidently an idea for a +5 adamantine cod piece. 2/6/2010

Since this isn’t a doodle on company time, I don’t have to crop out any of the incriminating details. Although this is a doodle from a Pathfinder game session, so maybe that’s incriminating enough on its own… sorry Mr. Skordal, my handwriting never got any better. 2/6/2010

One last doodle found on a back page in the Red Moleskine. Date unknown 2008-2009.

A faceless head. Unknown date, found in a Moleskine from 2008-2009

Some doodles while I was waiting for some tests to complete. Yes, yellow legal pad. The two characters, of course, are inspired by Evan Dorkin’s Milk & Cheese. 3/15/2011

It’s no L.H.O.O.Q. and I’m sure that the food critic from the local newspaper is a very nice lady, but this was the best snidely whiplash I’ve done in a while. 3/15/2011

I was thinking about Victorian botanical prints, which is odd when the meeting subject is selling digital magazines. 8/10/2009

This completes the series! I was laid off on 8/26 along with 20% more of the company. I threw the Red Moleskine into a box with the rest of my stuff and haven’t really looked at it until now. A happy ending anyways, as three months later I had a much better job at a much better company.

Another mountain. The weird thing is that I’m not really a mountain person, well, except for the Grizzly Adams beard. 7/23/2009

Trip to Metaphor Mountain

Evidently this was a metaphor for something, but I can’t remember what exactly. 7/21/2009

Just a couple of happy little trees. 7/13/2009

Days of Mountains and Pie

7 months without any doodles! That translates to only 8 pages of notes, however. Things were not good. My boss was fired and 20% of the company was laid off. These doodles were from a meeting about launching a revamped “2.0” version of the product that sunk the company the previous year. 5/5/2009

Happy Pi Day!

I remember this meeting on 10/2/2008 quite well. This was the meeting in which the management consultant who had been working with the company for 3 years admitted he had not looked at our web reader product in that entire time until that week. All the more shocking/disheartening was that this was pretty much our only product, too. Then, showing that his management skills really were worth 10-20 paid hours per week for 3 years, he called it utter crap and that for the sake of his professional reputation he couldn’t recommend it to any of his contacts. That was his way of trying to motivate us to work harder on the next version, so naturally I drew a leech.

Adventuring party. 9/28/2008

Exploding tree, or at least that’s what it’s supposed to be. 9/23/2008

This isn’t a coworker. 9/8/2008

Coworker drawn during yet another staff meeting. 7/16/2008

6 full pages without any doodles! I must have been busy. I’m not sure what the thing on the left is. The center figure is known as “Kid Onion.” 7/15/2008

Eek! A ghost! 6/1/2008

Ah, now this is more like it. Note that I misspelled ‘enfer’ - I never claimed to know French. 4/29/2008

Only doodle on three pages of notes. I was ready for that meeting to be over. 4/24/2008

Red Moleskine Part 3: Beards

 

Evidently I was thinking about beards (and faces) on these meetings from 4/2 to 4/11/2008. These are also the only doodles out of four full pages of dense notes, so something interesting must have been going on.

As you can see, I was paying a lot of attention during these meetings on 3/20, 3/24, 3/26 and 4/1/2008.

The Red Moleskine Series

I love using Moleskine journals to take notes at work. They are sturdy, slip easily into a pocket and are far neater than some curling legal pad or cheap wirebound notebook. Yes, they are trendy (or were, are they still?) and expensive, but well worth it I always thought. They are also very good for doodling in when you spend many hours a week in meetings.

When I made the switch from web development to QA at a previous employer, I traded in my black notebook for a fancy red one. Why red? I thought QA was all about finding errors and correcting them. Ah, so naive I was!

Drawn during the weekly QA mtg. 2/20/2008

Mtg about passing off my remaining development work. I’m fairly certain I was thinking about the characters Dmitri and Alina Tokamak from Dresden Codak. 2/25/2008

Continuation of previous meeting. Pretty much sums up how I felt about that project. 2/27/2008

Self portrait on the back of an envelope. 3/28/2001