Howdy folks! Zatcaskagoon here. I’ve been wanting to write regular/semi-regular updates for the website to keep everyone in the loop with current news, ongoing projects, and upcoming developments. I’ll be using the “A Bright Future for the Grimdark” thread to continue this idea. Feel free to comment below with your ideas or questions.

I wanted to talk about the “From the Vault Series” currently hitting Youtube every week and how that works. Below is a visual aid video that will help you to understand my idea. Please excuse the quality. I’m a visual thinker, so when I have an idea, it helps me to sketch them like illustrated below. It’s not meant to be pretty. It’s meant to aid in understanding.

As you can see in my little video, I’m looking to maintain a “Membership Content Block” or a library of premium content that is exclusive to the Compendium.

This Content block will typically maintain 130 exclusive video tutorials and 20 exclusive PDF guides. (more on PDFs later)

As we cycle in new content to the Membership, older content will be cycled off to Youtube and made available in the website’s free access section.

This old content is, as you know, dubbed the “From the Vault” Series.

Next up, I wanted to introduce the first of a new PDF series I am adding to the website!

Our first addition will be from Witchhammer, one of my favorite grimdark artists.

The goal here is to have a bi-weekly addition of instructional PDFs to the website.

Check out the first PDF here.

Finally, I wanted to talk about the OSL Technique, and it’s usage in the community.

I see the OSl Technique being used a lot in our community today, and I want to address a reoccurring issue in its usage. There seems to be a disregard in understanding how light would travel and where highlights and shadows would show up on surrounding surfaces. The biggest thing I’m noticing is the lack of cast shadows. To simplify it as much as I can, I’ll say that if a light is traveling across a surface and it runs into one side of an object or obstruction, then a deep shadow will be cast on the other side of that object or obstruction. We need to be taking the time to paint in the shadows. OSL is a very dominant and eye-catching technique. This is not something we want to be skimping out on. Equally important is edge-highlighting every single edge around the light source. Keep in mind that as we move further away from the light source, the dimmer the reflected light on the edges will become.

I have added my OSL Technique Tutorial to the free access section of the website. You can find it here or watch it below. In the tutorial I address these ideas of highlights and shadows. This could be something I address again with a follow-up video on how to make OSL look as good as we can. We will see.