Author Archives: JR19759

Character Of The Week- 31st August

Now, up until this morning I had a completely different picture in mind for this weeks COTW, however, when I saw this piece by prswirve when I did my rounds this morning, I felt compelled to change.

8:31 prswirve_elantra

 

Now the first thing that caught my eye here was the patterns that cover her body. I love how they are light on one side and dark on the other, very unusual and effective, especially when the alpha setting on both colours is lowered to allow the shading from the items behind to show through.

The next thing I looked at was the face. She has a great look of focus, with the pursed lips and staring eyes, which is accentuated by the 'ready' pose. The shading here is great too, it brings out the facial features wonderfully and doesn't overpower the pattern that carries over onto the face from the body.

Which brings me nicely onto my second favourite thing about this character, the costume.  I love the custom made top, which teams Far Eastern historic with modern style very nicely, shows of the skin pattern on the shoulder and manages to make pink, purple and brown work together. Of course not everything works brilliantly, the right shoe is a bit off and the cape by the leg could have worked better if a different cape had been used, but those are the only gripes.

However, the best bit of this picture for me is the energy effect prs has created. The warmth of the pinks, oranges and golds used is incredible, it looks like a sunrise and contrasts brilliantly against the dusty dull brown of the background at that point. Brilliantly done.

Big Question ♯16

Seeing as how the only person in the world who has reacted favourably to the news that Ben Affleck is going to be the next Batman is Matt Damon, I thought that I might as well ask, who would you have chosen instead?

Put yourself in the shoes of the casting director. The star of the last (a hugely successful with both critics and audiences) trilogy of films has ruled himself out of returning to the cape and cowl, so now you've got to find someone who can play an older more experienced and battle hardened Batman who can stand up to super-humans way above his power range for at least two movies and probably more as the Justice League juggernaut is prepared. Who do you pick?

Power User Profiles: Livewyre1014

This weeks Power User is a great creator who has one of the most well thought out comic book universes on the forums. He's also a great commenter and kick-ass pose builder. So, it gives me great pleasure to introduce the one and only; Livewyre1014 Continue reading

Character Design Contest ♯38- It’s A Kind Of Magic

For this weeks challenge, I want you to create something magical, some form of witch, wizard or warlock, sage, sorcerer or spell-caster, mage or magician. You can create a modern Merlin or a fantasy fire-mage. My only stipulation is that they should be pictured performing some form of magic, be it casting a spell, riding a flying broom or turning a prince into a toad.

Please make sure you have read the rules before entering. As usual, no limit on entries, so have fun and good luck.

Rules for posts, contests, and challenges that I am hosting: Original characters only, no copyrighted characters, no characters based on copyrighted characters, no characters based on RPG’s or other games. The characters must be your own design and not based on any character that might be copyrighted in any way. I have the right to delete any post that I believe crosses this line without warnings. Only post characters that you have either created for this contest specifically or you know for certain have never been entered to a contest before. If you aren’t certain, don’t enter it, because I’m not going to go back through all of the contests and check.

What Were They Thinking- Amalgam Comics

Now, I will get this out of the way straight away. I'm not saying that the Amalgam crossover between DC and Marvel was a bad idea. I'm saying it was a badly executed idea. The concept was sound. Mix together some of our best loved and most popular heroes in a new universe for a couple of special limited series, great thinking, fine with that. But then you have to go and ruin it by making bad choices for amalgamations or bad costume choices for those that you've done well. The best illustration of this is to look at each level individually.

Continue reading

Character Design Contest ♯36 Winner (Reviving The Brand)

And the winner of this weeks poll is NHA247 for his re-imagining of Cobra. Congratulations NHA and well done to everyone who entered, there were some excellent designs in this contest.

36 NHA247-Cobra

Character Design Contest ♯37 Poll (Opposites Attract)

[polldaddy poll="7345630"]

Character Of The Week- 24th August

This week we're going to look at a classic 'machiner doing an interpretation of one of another classic 'machiner's characters. So, for your viewing pleasure here is AMS's take on Atomic Punk's eponymous signature character.

8: 24 AMS- Atomic Punk

Now, this has got everything you'd expect from an AMS creation. 3/4 position pose (with clothes masked to fit), awesome shading, custom items (see right foot for details), cool face.

However, what really makes this one stand out for me is the way the costume is put together. The colour scheme is a good place to start here. Three colours, the usual and best number for a costume of this sort, with two colours (the yellow and black) being the dominant, whilst the third (white) is used sparingly, to give a distinction between large areas of the two dominant colours. The jacket sleeves are a good example of this, the white giving a border between the mainly yellow jacket and the black gloves.

We also see some very nice design features that really sell the costume design, the biggest and most obvious of which is the checkered leg with the belted knee (which might be my favourite part of the design). But we also have the neckwear jumper neck along the bottom of the jacket, the chain and the stripes on the jacket which all work together to really sell the design. I also like the fact that the zip on the jacket is also checkered, it gives a nice bit of continuity from the jacket to the trousers. It may be subtle but it just adds that little bit extra.

Big Question ♯15

This week, I will be letting you guys do most of the work. What I want to know is, who do you think are the best comic book characters of all time? Not just superhero comics, but war comics, crime comics, romance comics, comedy comics etc. etc.

Now you can answer in anyway you like, provided you give some explanation. You can give me a list, separate it out into genres, go male character/ female character/ alien character, I don't mind. However, it'd be nice to see someone other than Batman mentioned, so please, no Dark Knight (it'd be like reading a list of the greatest ever bands and seeing The Beatles at number 1, yes there's a reason that it's so damn obvious but it's so damn obvious).

Now, over to you.

Things I Like: ChasingArtwork

Don't worry, I'm not about to spring a new random blog topic on everyone. This is only a one off thing because I feel this needs to been shown. There's this guy on DeviantART called ChasingArtwork who does some of the most amazing mech characters I've ever seen. But the best thing is he does redesigns of things like Assassins Creed, The Avengers, Alien and the three below which are my faves. You can check his stuff out here: http://chasingartwork.deviantart.com

Teenager Mutant Ninja Turtles (a.k.a: Turtle Tech)

Spider-Man

Batman + Villains (Gotham Gears)

Yeah, I know it's got nothing to do with Heromachine, but oh well.