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!

In the next couple of weeks I’ll be releasing some additional Expansion items, including a nice set of firearms by the invaluable Mark Shute. Since people seem to like guns and other assorted firearms, I thought I’d provide a preview of what they look like (click the image for a much larger version):

One of the things Mark does much better than I is creating drawings of mechanical items with clean, crisp lines that convey a sense of solidity. My Flash drawings tend to look like they were drawn with a brush, while Mark’s are more like those rendered with a good set of technical pens. It works much better for these kinds of things, and I have to admit I learn something every time I work with his stuff.

This next expansion to the expansion is going to add several hundred items to the set, thanks to Mark, including some really nice shirts and belts, among many others. You can see the full set of items he’s submitted here.

I use a Wacom graphic tablet to draw all of the items in the HeroMachine. It cuts development time dramatically, and allows me to combine the art production and code development into one application. I don’t think I could ever go back to a pure pen and ink on paper method of drawing at this point, I’m lost to the dark side.

Anyway, I thought you might be interested in seeing a demonstration of how, in general, you can go from a neat photograph of something to a finished digital pen and ink illustration like those found in the program. There’s no sound, just a visual — my auditory skills haven’t quite caught up to the times yet.

The “robot” skin probably takes longer to draw than any other single item in the program, but I think the one for the male Brick has turned out the best of all:

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Before I get going whole-hog on the site, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the kinds of things I am going to talk about. And if that’s not meta enough for you, I don’t know what is.

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