HeroMachine Character Portrait Creator

Well, this week I'm reeeeeeeally gonna stretch my own rules. Whilst, there have been numerous artworks this week that I could have talked about (COTW regular RobM coming closest, go check out the latest work on his thread, it's pretty damn sweet), one person has been being consistently amazing with practically everything he's submitted this week that I felt I had to cover him. But when it came down to it, I'm an indecisive bugger, so guess what I'm gonna do.

Now, why am I covering multiple characters in a post that usually only covers one picture. Well, I have some very important points to make and Anarchangel is the best 'machiner to use when demonstrating all of those points at once.

First off we have a definite sense of style. If you look at all of these pictures together, it is immediately recognisable who did them, by certain defining factors. The shading style is very distinctive, very subtle, not overused or overshadowing the design, more of an enhancement of what is already there than a stand-out eye-catch. Which really works for Anarchangels style. He has a definite knowledge of light sources. If you look at his work you can see exactly where the light is coming from, because he's made it blatantly obvious.

Then we have inventive and well worked costumes. Two words I can use to describe these are cohesive and stylish. They look like they could actually be from comics or cartoons, even from a live-action movie. Anarchangel has a way of coming up with these really cool looking patterns with masking and insignias that other people wouldn't think of (best example here is Tokyo Rose). And then we have the colour schemes. Simple, clean and effective. You don't need to use more than 3 colours, maybe a 4th for detailing, but that's the limit. The only one of the above characters that uses that 4th colour is Aeon, and that is for two small aspects of the costume, and they all look fabulous.

Lastly, we have an attitude to the characters. You don't have to be the worlds greatest poser or face-maker to get across a character's personality, you just need to have an idea of it and see where it takes you. All of these characters has a definite character despite being in pretty much the standard face-forward pose and most of their faces covered, just by moving the hands a bit here, changing the position of the leg there and a bit of shading on an eye to finish it off. By just tweaking certain things you can change a characters personality from serious to silly, suspicious to incensed. You can imply action, movement or power through a simple hand gesture. All you need to do is look and think, "how can I say this with what I have".