Thanks to Pesky for this characer, posted on the UGO Forums:

I think he uses transparency well here, making the green part of the wings look translucent, for example, without going quite too far. I also like the use of the new Expansion hover-platform beneath the character to ground it a bit more, and the diamond background gives it all the feeling of a real character illustration.

Nice job, Pesky, keep up the good work!

Over on the UGO Forums, “thedoompixel” has a thread showing off some characters he’s made. One in particular jumped out at me and I thought you might enjoy seeing what he’s done:

One of the things I like about this character is the way he’s made the “skin” component completely transparent, allowing the clothing items to take the weight of giving the figure form. I also like the clean and simple color palette, with just the eyes in a bold red against black and white. This is a really innovative design, an excellent example of “less is more”. You don’t have to load your character down with an item from every single component, sometimes (usually!) it’s better to rely on a few simple choices to carry the narrative forward.

There are several other characters in that thread that are well worth your time, so head on over and take a gander when you get a chance.

Well done, thedoompixel!

A friend of mine, “EvilDM” Jeff Mejia, created a role-playing game called “Legends of Steel” and asked me to do some character sketches for him. One of the characters was a pirate thief named Talena, and to show me what he wanted he sent me this HeroMachine image:

I took that and redrew it to look like this:

This is the kind of thing I’d like to do in the upcoming “Custom Character Portrait” contest, or whatever we end up calling it (suggestions more than welcome!). I think the original HM version is nice, and could even be used for a camera-ready, print-quality production if he wanted, but there’s just nothing like an actual illustration done by a pro.

Over the years I’ve had a couple of freelance clients send me images of a character from HeroMachine that they wanted to have in a custom illustration. Don’t get me wrong, HeroMachine is great for making “darn good” portraits, but there’s just nothing like a true, unique, professionally rendered image.

I thought it might be interesting to show you how the program can be used to give an artist a really good idea of what you’re looking for, though, so here’s one example of a character designed in HeroMachine, then rendered by hand. I give you Kubota, pint-sized (but deadly serious) soldier of fortune in the Star Frontiers game world (click on either image for a larger version):

I’ll be posting a few more of these over the next little while, the HeroMachine version first and then the custom illustration next. If anyone’s interested, I’ve also been thinking about having a contest. People would send me their HeroMachine creations, I’d pick, say, the five best, and then open it up to a vote. The winner would get a custom character portrait based on that visual.

If that sounds interesting, please leave a comment and let me know!