Fortress #9

While I was fooling around with Painter on my new computer, a friend suggested I do a Bob Ross style painting. I switched to the palette knife tool and doodled this. Later I added some caverns…

Fortress #8

I went and saw a play of The Little Prince the other day.  Color this time, because I thought that the molten core needed some color.

Fortress #7

A big part of these forts is that they are doodles. If I were to put on my fine art hat, I would say that process is important. Not to say I wouldn’t post a fort that I spent a huge amount of time on, but for the purposes of this blog a secret base or fort is far more artistically authentic if it is drawn during a class, business meeting, jury duty or whatever.

In the case of this doodle, I recently attended a workshop that happened to take place in a local church. It was long and boring and occasionally informative. I haven’t been inside a church since 1995, and I guess the experience was inspiring. I assume they allow Spaghetti Monster and Deep One worship at interfaith centers…

Fortress #6

Project not abandoned, I just don’t spend a lot of time drawing fortresses. This one is a mountain library with an attached rare-books vault, as suggested by Amelia. The waterfall element is supposed to be outside, but I think I wasn’t entirely successful depicting it. You should be able to click on the image for a larger version, if you like.

Fortress #5

A few blocks from where I live there is a nondescript green building (link to google maps/streetview). It has bars on all the windows and doors, and all the windows are sort of frosted so you can’t really see inside, although you can see that in a lot of places there are boxes piled up against the windows that go all the way to the ceiling. The construction is basically cinderblock bricks. The building is so agressively non-descript that it took me over a year to notice it was there at all.

The best part about this building, when you finally do notice it, is the name on the doors (on signs on the other side of bars… You can see the signs in the google maps thing I linked to, but you can’t read them…). The name is Scientific Research Co.

Clearly, if ever there were a building with a secret zombie lab in the basement, it is this one. That notion is what inspired this fort.

After I did this drawing, I googled Scientific Research Co. not really expecting such an obvious secret government lab to have a website, but it turns out they do. I note that “a full service fabrication facility serving manufacturing customers across many industries including transportation, heating, electronics, medical, aircraft, machinery, and recreational equipment” would be an excellent cover for a secret underground zombie (or better yet, robot) lab. Large deliveries of metal and machinery of any description would pretty much go unnoticed…

Fortress #4

Fortress #3

Fortress #2

A prop driven castle in the clouds. This one was drawn at a family gathering whilst waiting to open presents. It has a beanstalk, an airplane, and a pony. I am currently using a shrunk down version of this as my header image…

That’s about it except that I am testing to see if this image breaks the template…

[edit: And it does. Or the template breaks the image. Hmm. Lame.]

[edit again: I guess I’ll do a smallish version that clicks through to a bigger one]

Fortress #1

If you looked at my classroom notes from the time that they started making me take them, you would have seen a lot more doodles than notes. One of the things that I liked to doodle was underground forts. Usually they were a side view, and they contained everything a bored ten year old might want or think of. So there were a lot of traps and gun racks and cannons and rooms devoted to ammo storage.

Sometimes I would branch out to ewok-style tree forts (for D&D elves, because I was a big ol’ nerd) or castles (again with the D&D), but mainly I stuck to underground forts. I had heard of the underground bunkers of the Maginot line, and I thought they sounded cool.

I’m pretty sure that I had stopped drawing them by the time I was 16.

Last summer I was unlucky enough to find myself in an all day meeting that was at least as boring and unpleasant as any class, and one of the things I drew was the half finished fort above. It’s your basic missile silo with control room and acid trap on the entry ladder. I had planned to add on to it down and to the left (underneath the dinosaur bones), but I got distracted and never came back to it. Even so, it was a minor revelation. Drawing hidden forts is demented and sad fun, and I can’t imagine why I stopped.

This blog is where I’m gonna put my hidden fort drawings, along with any notes about them…