International Anklebiter Illustrator Day

As is the case with many working artists, people often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people.

I do indeed: get a job.

Our economy is deficient in many fundamental ways and should current trends continue you will be shipped overseas in a melon box to work for a Chinese person long before you reach college age.

Another thing people often ask me is: Can you draw this for me? To which I generally answer: No.

Now it doesn't take an Ivy degree to see we have a classic chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation here.

To wit: I declare and ordain May 29th as International Anklebiter Illustrator Day throughout RPGlandia.

Here is what you must do:

1. Locate a child.

2. Locate two one-dollar bills or the local equivalent.

3. Explain patiently to the child that you--a dungeon master or otherwise appointed administrator of a substantial swath of fictional space--are desirous of illustrations.

4. Explain to the child that you are contracting him or her to provide such imagery at a page rate of 1 dollar per page. (Which believe you me is a sum infinitely greater than many web and print publications currently offer for such services.)

5. Explain to the child that the deadline is May 28th, thus allowing you, the client, at least one day to scan and upload the drawing to the internet.

Note that this may require you explaining to the child the definition of the word "deadline" as well adumbrating the process by which days accumulate into months and that these accumulated months are then packaged and named for ease of public consumption. I trust that you are up to the task and that they are probably too young for any of this information to strike them as being as traumatic as it actually is.

6. After acquiring their informed consent, give them the specific assignments:

The first drawing can be anything you, the GM, want--you can take a crappy town you drew and ask the child to redraw it better, you can describe a treasure the child needs to create and detail, you can have the child make a dungeon map of their own design. It is none of my concern so long as it fulfills a need in your campaign.

The second drawing, however, must be a displacer beast. This is because I have grown jaded and strange over the long years and so have you and it will entertain both of us mightily to see children's interpretations of the catlike and inimitable displacer beast erupt all over the internet come May 29.

Tell them color is preferable and may get them an extra 25 cents to spend in any way they please. Glitter, construction paper, play-doh or digital media are also acceptable.

7. Now we all know freelancers are chronic whiners without respect for authority. If the child tries to pass substandard work off on you, print out the following drawings and shake them in the child's face menacingly, saying "ONE OF THESE CHILDREN WAS TEN AND THE OTHER WAS ELEVEN!

CHRIS AUMAN DREW THIS IN A CAVE WHEN HE WAS 12 WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!

...IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU BE MORE LIKE THEY ARE! PICK UP THAT SPARKLETUBE AND GET CRACKING, TOAD! YOUR DROPPED CHEERIOS ARE OF NO INTEREST TO ME, WE DO NOT DO EXCUSES HERE!"

8. Upload such work as is produced onto the internet on May 29th. Inform me of the url by the usual channels or via rapid Clown-O-Gram. No hobo clowns.

9. If, in the interim, you have seen fit to employ the child further on campaign work since the initial work order, please upload any and all projects fulfilled to date on the 29th.

10. Older children or those possessed of extraordinary skill may be employed at a higher rate if you see fit--though not too much higher. You must not create the hope in their minds that they, as freelance creatives, can expect to work under any but the most animalistic conditions. Conversely, if the child is exceptionally poor or uneducated, you may be able to get them to work for only a nickel.

11. You have my permission to republish this message on your own blog. In fact, if you intend to participate or would like others to do so, I encourage it.

If you're extremely clever, you might be able to get them to draw you a whole planet and then wrap it around a globe digitally like so.