Nature can do some amazing things!

More stuff is coming along as I sift through various pieces throughout these past few years. Photography has now been added as a sub-menu because on occasion I find that perfect shot and can’t resist capturing it. Everyone else has the fancy cameras, I just work with what I’ve got. In this case, since I live in sunny Arizona I can really capture some amazing shots of some astounding places like the Grand Canyon and Sedona. You can’t help but be captivated by the sheer majesty of these places and everything they represent. This state is probably a geologist’s dream! We Zoni’s rock the triple digit weather with style, but only in Phoenix can you drive two hours in any direction and be in a completely different climate and geographical atmosphere! During the fall months once a year, I typically go on a camping excursion with my best friends Amanda and Tiffiny. We hoist the pirate flag and sing raunchy songs while playing games, reading manga, and burning up as much dead firewood that we can find in the forest.
In any case, yes…photography is now up and available to take a look at! Just don’t forget to click on the main Artwork link in the main menu to access my original material that I drew by hand and whatnot. Enjoy!

After a few years of hosting Tower games, I wanted to really just put all of my core design skills into a solid project that could eventually platform off into either a video game or a TCG if push came to shove. With the video game industry having a weird push and pull with sales and products, I decided to go back to my tabletop roots. I’ve honestly been enjoying the camaraderie of hanging out with my different social circles and finding out that we can all be united under a similar banner of geekery. I quit playing World of Warcraft almost a year ago, although my guildmates are calling to me under the Horde banner once more. I just might succumb, although I’d have to consider my boyfriend’s feelings…or assimilate him into the WoW fold. He was a Final Fantasty MMO nerd for a time, and WoW is infinitely better in design despite its age.

Back to the main topic at hand, after college my tabletop days pretty much disappeared in favor of forum-based role-play games. This was mostly because I was no longer hanging out with the guys anymore. They all moved back to their respective states after graduation. Most of my female friends weren’t really gamers, but they liked the story-telling role-play styles of the free-form games. After a few years of being a co-administrator of The Host Boards (an Ouran High School Host Club meets The Wallflower), they created Living Island. A “crack” style of role-play where everyone picks an established character from some type of series and completes crazy objectives that are done “for the lulz”. This was the light bulb that struck me for constructing the Tower games. From here I was able to introduce tabletop gaming at its core, keeping all the “fun bits” of playing with dice while completely leaving out all of the convoluted d20 systems and other mechanics that they didn’t understand in games like Dungeons & Dragons.

While I enjoy hosting Tower games, they’ve now become something that my friends request of me when guests are in town and they want something uniquely fun to do, I feel it’s time to take what I’ve learned and apply these elements to a full throttle tabletop fantasy game. Hence The Immortals was born into conceptualization, and it’s now been two years of “writing meticulous notes here and there” to where the skeletal core of WHAT is being played has finally been hammered out. Now comes the difficult part of HOW it’s going to play out, as well as HOW to keep everything “simple to learn, complex to master” as well as maintain balance. To this I will eventually need to accrue a team to help me work on all these details, but for now I’m just going to bang out the basics and see where that gets me!

The current world of Clayne designed for The Immortals

Snail mail can be fun again with the right stationary paper!

For a time there was a while when Photoshop and I “fell out of touch” with each other. The series of jobs I had weren’t utilizing any of my skills but taking up 40+ hours of my time. At that point, another thing had occurred that ultimately created a spark of lightening…I ran out of Japanese stationary! Yes, I’m one of those silly individuals who still likes to write old school letters from time to time. E-mail certainly makes things efficient, but I don’t collect E-mails into my box of nostalgia. So I decided to create some anime-themed stationary paper for the simple enjoyment of having those unique letters that stand out from the monotony of life in the mailbox.

Phantom Brave is copyright © Nippon Ichi Software all rights are reserved to them.

The three I ended up ultimately creating were from Disgaea, Phantom Brave, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Cartoons are nice and clean to work with when it comes to lines and other elements. Plus I’m a big fan of Nippon Ichi Software games, so naturally these were the favored ones to make. The Pleinair stationary from Disgaea was my first test subject. Her elements were a lot simpler and closer to the “traditional” themes that you would find on stationary paper. The format is basic, and the back side is more like a copy-paste wallpaper method. From there I decided to up the complexities on the next piece and was inspired from a Live Journal icon I made a while back. Taking the exact design format of the 100 x 100 pixel icon, I translated it into an 8.5″ x 10″ piece of stationary paper. The effects were…brilliant! Literally, the stationary is a color wonder of epic proportions. Whether I could actually write anything that was legible or not was irrelevant at this point because I was just excited to be able to transform a dinky icon into a full piece of stationary art!

Asuka and Neon Genesis Evangelion are copyright © GAINAX all rights are reserved to them.

Last but not least was Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Her design was darker and I decided to do the piece as a nod to this gentleman who was following up on my work for a while. Asuka was my favorite character from that series anyway, and since I had enough gorgeous art assets to really make the stationary pop, it was my last piece before I went into Photoshop hibernation again. Overall I love all three of these pieces! I plan to do more in the future, but hopefully the art assets will be my own from my Immortals tabletop game instead. That would be a lot of fun!

Huzzah for doodles!

It’s time to venture back into the foray of websites again, and my how things have changed! I remember back when I used to have to code everything by hand with simple HTML commands. Today it’s a whole different ball game, and my code-illiterate self is just not up to par. In any case, welcome to the works of Lauren Sefchik! This site is designed to show off my abilities as an artist, designer, and a writer since my passion covers all three fields in various ways. I am going to announce my obligatory “Pardon for the dust, this site is under construction!” for the time being as I get my bearings straight on how to navigate some things, as well as post up both new and old material for your viewing pleasure.