Jim Lassiter aka - "The Red Bearded Dwarf"
The Castlewalls website came into being because I needed to make covers for my music.
It's gone through a few servers and a few incarnations to the current version you see now.
But music? Yes, I used to have a "tabletop" recording studio, by that I mean just enough
recording equipment to fit on a table. I also had and played guitar, bass, drums and a bit of keyboard.

So, years ago I recorded my songs onto cassette and wanted to make some nice labels
and such. I started out with a canon inkjet wordprocessor unit that had about 6 fonts built in.
I became unhappy with it and bought my first computer, a fast 286 w/one meg of ram on a
chip and Win 3.0 using Wordperfect for DOS and it's line font to draw with. I started creating
ADnD & Harnic PC/NPC sheets with the line font but there was still something needed.

After I "outgrew" that, I went on to MS Publisher and started expanding my abilities with
gaming sheets and such but it wasn't what i was looking for in the way of graphic manipulation.

A longtime friend, Brad Page (the guitarist from Ten Story Love) was using Coreldraw 5
(this was some time ago) and let me borrow it for a month or so.

I was hooked! I've been using it ever since.

So where do the gaming floorplans and Castlewalls come into play?

It's a typical story, one day I decided to "convert" one of my hand-drawn gaming maps using
Coreldraw. Initially, I just used thick linework for walls and such. After awhile, I started to
approach the drawing of the floorplans as if they could be really built - proper thickness'
of the walls, staircases and supporting structures in the correct location. No 10' wide
secret corridors here! I try to "walk" through each floorplan and put myself into the
location as if i was going to have it built for me. It's gotta make sense!
I needed a name - I drew castles - I made the walls thick - Castlewalls......
No great epiphany, no startling revelations, pretty boring if you ask me.......

I showed some plans to my gaming buddies and they said they were good enough to sell,
even my wife and in-laws thought it would be a good idea! So i tried on the old Bizland website,
albeit not very well. So I gave up on the sales end and just kept drawing until another friend told me about Dragonsfoot. My maps found a home...

I also met a nice guy by the name of Brian K. Moseley (I was searching the internet looking for
"map" competition - I'm always looking...) who had a lot of great material. We formed a
friendship that continues to this day. He showed me a preliminary cover he made for one of his
products and i suggested he let me have a go at it. As I had been creating other "artwork"
besides the floorplans, I thought I could do his material some justice (I hoped so anyway!).
I had (and miss to this day but it's just too expensive) cable internet at the time, so i was a
constant pain (?) to Brian, always drawing covers and such, sending things constantly, being
able to chat and draw & send stuff at the same time. It was some of the best times I ever had.
I learned a lot....

Well, I've another ISP and another web address...

Someone needs to write a book about webpage creation from a graphic artist point of view!
Now if Coreldraw was a web authoring tool, I would be invincible!
Yes, CD has a "publish to Internet" feature - stay as far away from it as possible!
But that's another story, trust me, I'm an authority on the subject!