Long post ahead. I decided to go through multiple hour the endeavor of trying to remake my avatar in Heromachine. First up I’ll post my hand drawn/computer colored version that I made back in 2013:
When I made it this had taken me 3 weeks of casual work to complete. I really like fire as an “element” and I’ve always had a thing for hybrid characters. So when I was designing her I was trying to decide if I wanted her to be a polymorphed dragon or a polymorphed phoenix. When I drew this I went for the dragon approach. So I gave her wings, horns, etc, and added small dragons onto her weapons. I was still torn between the two creatures though, so I also added feathers to her armor design so I could have a little phoenix too. Red and gold are my favorite colors so that explains the color palette.
Next up is my original Heromachine creation of her I did a in 2014:
At the time I was really happy with this. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the drawn version but I felt I had gotten as close to the original as I could. Over time though, as I got better at using Heromachine, I began to feel that this version was pretty lazy, not very nice to look at, and that it had a lot of missing details that I wish I had added to it.
So I elected to recreate it:
I wanted to make a version that was her pre-transformation into her hybrid state. I knew that the hybrid version would get busy by the time I was done. So I saved this to have a clean version with just the armor. Overall it’s a millions times better than the original. I was really happy that I didn’t ignore the details in her armor this time around. Comparing her to my drawn version I’m hard pressed to find even a piece of missing jewelry. I had to invert the pose a bit but hey, she has a pose now!
And here’s the final version. Like I said I knew it was going to get a bit busy. There are a few changes to her design vs my drawn version. Those are due to mental changes I’ve made over the years. One example are her arms which are now scaled. I wanted a more thorough “hybrid” feel and the wings and horns alone weren’t doing it for me. Instead of two rows of small horns on her head, four large ones also gave a better feeling. Last big change was the wings. Ultimately I decided to make her a “phoenix dragon”, so the wings changed color for a more fiery look and feathers were added. The only thing I really would have liked to tweak more would have been the shading in the wings. They kinda stick out in a way I’m not 100% happy with. Unfortunately, once I get to 100+ layers the app really starts to take a toll on my laptop. In the end though I love the result.
