This was a personal project I did for the birthday of the game master of our Dungeons & Dragons group. The Idea was to get a bunch of insiders, pictures and art drawn during the sessions and put them on the Tavern Board of the local In-Game Tavern, the blue ox, or „Zum blauen Ochsen“. For the tavern board background I used a few various wood board textures from unsplash. I used one board with vector graphic of a drunken blue bull I made, and rendered some shadows of that in Illustrator, which I used in Photoshop together with the same graphic with the oil painting filter and composited that on the board to create a look of a cut out and painted board.
For the assets displayed on the board, I thought of a mix of notes and scribblings / graffiti on the board, as happens with taverns (or bars). Because the project was more leaning into fun than realism, since incorporating photographs in a fantasy setting is inherently difficult and I didn’t want to put an ugly AI filter on them, and the effort to paint over all of them was a bit too much, so moving away from a realistic board also provided more fun with all the assets.
For example the sign forbidding evil snake people being slapped together with Comic Sans and a weird red text shadow, as the effort of the tavern owner who wouldn’t have much skills in graphic design. For all of the notes I used some paper and pergament textures, which I adapted to fit the various motives.
Since using typefaces for a lot of supposedly different text gets hard and stale fast, I drew out the scribbles and graffiti on a notebook, then photographed them with my macro lens and as uniform lighting as I could manage. This way I still had flexibility of bending things a bit in photoshop, while at the same time having a hand drawn wide range of text creating distinct looks.
One part I want to highlight is the signature of my character Anouke. We had the idea to all sign as our characters, so I wanted to create something resembling her. She is a druid and spent most of her life as a hermit in the desert, and she uses a raven skull worn around her neck as a druidic magical focus, so the raven skull is an important part of her, therefore I thought she might incorporate it into her signature as the A of Anouke. Even if not reckognized as a raven skull it has an unusual look befitting an unusual woman. Additionally I added fragmented hairlines to create a look like sand falling down, connecting to her origin.
I created the Assets as pngs with transparency so I could arrange them easily within InDesign. In Indesign I brought all the assets together and arranged them in a way to emulate the chaos often found on less organized boards. Most assets were made completely by me, but there are a few exceptions, like obviously the character signatures were made by each other player, though I had to edit them a bit for transparency. Additionally Lisa, the player of Corryn created four additional visuals, to give even more variety in the dispayed scribbles and graffities beyond the ones I made. I’ve highlighted the visuals created by others in the picture below, to give an overview of what I made:
