Instead this week I've been playing around with Inkscape on my desktop. I've been neglecting Inkscape for some time, having shiny new Adobe toys to play with, but Inkscape is really great and frankly I think can offer serious clout against Illustrator, at the very least in the usability stakes. It might just be my unfamiliarity with Illustrator but the node tools are really clunky. It involves cycling through three different tools just to create and move nodes, while Inkscape just uses the one. Admittedly Illustrator has an awful lot more useful functionality - the ability to add brush strokes and the smart fill tool are godsends - but Inkscape's node tool is a winner in my books.
What I have been working on is somewhat tangentially related to GameDev - I've been making some Order of the Stick fan art. I'd noticed over on their forums that there was a small but keen Inkscape community there due to the perfect match with Rich Burlew's stick figure style. I thought it was a good exercise to try my hand at my own fan art as a chance to dust off the Inkscaping skills.
The GameDev link comes because it was from here that I was made aware of the comic in the first place - I think it was in a "Recommend a Webcomic" thread in the Lounge. Plus it's all about DnD, so the gaming link is strong. Furthermore, I've posted some of the art here in my webspace because I couldn't get the permissions to work over at my own site; I've locked down the image linking abilities and my webmaster skills were too poor at the time to figure out how to make an exception (at least when compared to my frustration levels at the time).
Given there's a large bunch of interested Inkscape beginners over there, I've also been working on reworking my Inkscape Adventures tutorial into a "Draw an Order of the Stick character" version. It's almost complete - just needs a lot of editing - and I think it'll work very well as an introduction to Inkscape. I'll post a link here when I'm done, as despite the webcomic flavour it'll work well as a good general tutorial.
Finally, since I'm sure some of you are fans of Order of the Stick, here's some of the fan comics I made for a friendly forum competition "Draw Order of the Stick characters in a musical or theatre production" to improve my Inkscape skills (you'll see them improve as they go). Be forewarned: the humour will involve both Order of the Stick references and knowledge of the play/musical in question, and goes beyond geekery into full blown nerdery.
Then you can open your own cafepress store for it :)