Recently, my buddy Troy Gilbert hooked me up with an invite to dribbble. Dribbble is basically kind of like a twitter for creatives, with a few extra rules; you get twenty-four “shots” every month, each of which is a small screenshot of something that you’re working on. The maximum image size that you can post is only four hundred by three hundred pixels, so everything there is mainly just some kind of glimpse or peek of the whole thing. This is nice for a couple of reasons – you don’t have to have a whole huge finished piece to post, and you can give a small tease of the greater work, which sometimes is more fun than seeing the entire deal all at once. It also lends itself to a nice kind of graphics simplicity on the site itself, and acts as a nice little creative constraint to work within when you’re creating a shot to post.
Anyway, I created my account on the last day of March, and the way it works, you get all twenty-four shots refreshed when the month rolls over, no matter how many you’ve posted. So, if you use all twenty-four, you get them all back; if you’ve only used one, you just get one more, bringing you back up to twenty-four. (“Drawing back up to your hand limit” is how I described it to someone else. So, since I had only a few hours to post everything that I could lay hands on, I got to work picking a few things that I had on various burners and cutting them to fit.
I wound up playing with some spray-paint graffiti techniques in Photoshop to create a “hello, world” post, and then moved on to the projects in front of me. I’d been drawing a hundred robots for a self-imposed challenge, so I found an interesting corner of my big art pad, and put up a shot of that. I’d also recently taken a couple of photos of some dungeon geomorph cards that I sketched up a while back (that were just sent to trade for a Machine of Death card), so those went up, too. I’m reworking Skin Men to fit in a much smaller format, and I posted a bit of the re-designed shrunk-up map from that, and finally, a piece of the Papair Hockey sheet that I was in the process of laying out.
Then midnight rolled around, and I took a little breather. I’m also getting back into exercising some of my illustration and design chops – which are more like … something clever that’s the opposite of a chop… – so I posted a bit of the Monkey Princess Palace that I’d been working up over at my unDesign blog, and that’s where we sit now. I have a bunch of older art that I could totally cut up and post, but it kind of feels like that’s going against the spirit of the thing. I could post old game boards and prototypes, or card designs or art from the cover of Twenty-Four Game Poems, but those are all done, and I’d like to keep generating new artwork and design bits for my dribbble stream, so maybe I will, and maybe I won’t. I have a bit of free time now to spend working on that kind of thing, so I should take advantage of it, right?