Re: Elizabethb’s Creations and Characters

[JR19759]

Welcome to the forums. Please make sure to read the forum rules if you haven’t done so already.
As for tips and critiques. Starting with the first pic, you could put a circle from the Insignias behind his head to make it look like there’s a back to the hood, like you did on the other pic. Also don’t forget ears, unless the characters hair is covering them. Also try masking the bow to his hands. Jeff did a tutorial on masking which you can find here: http://www.heromachine.com/2014/01/08/how-to-use-the-mask-feature-in-heromachine3/ or you can get there by going on to the transform tab on any object and on the left hand side there should be a small button with a mask on and some blue writing underneath saying “How to mask”, if you click that it’ll take you to the tutorial.
As for the second pic, well firstly his head looks too big and it’s pushing the hood upwards so now the bulge where the hood should be meeting the shoulders is a long way above it. You could also try using different items for the cape, so you don’t have that odd overlap where the cape should be disappearing behind his shoulder but instead ends up in front of his arm. Just play around with rotation and positioning there. Finally, the bow. I did a tutorial on how to do a drawn bow string for another ‘machiner, so hopefully you’ll find this useful.

1. Start off by getting the basic pose you want, for the purposes of this tutorial I’ve just gone for a basic sideways draw (obviously bare minimum, because it’s only a tutorial, but this technique should work for more complex positions).

2. Next thing you are going to need to do is get rid of the original bow string. To do this start off by masking another arm to an insignia over where the bow string crosses the first arm. That way you don’t have to worry about weird layering.

3. Now we get rid of the string properly. Use a large scale insignia to cover over the majority of the string (which is why we layered/ masked another arm on top of the bow string originally), then use circles to do the bit where the string meets the bow. You’ll have to size differently to fit the different bows here. After you’ve finished match the insignia colour to your background colour (in this case white).

4. Now we are ready to start making the new bow string. Get another square/ rectangle insignia and line it up with where the bow string originally attached to the bow and then angle it so it makes a straight line to the pulling hand (this will take a bit of trial and error).

5. Make the insignia 1 pixel thin and then lengthen to preference (here I used 2 rectangles at 1-200 which fitted perfectly) and layer the rectangle under the pulling hand.

6. Finally, do the same for the upper part of the string, only with the insignia layered above the hand and placed so it ends where the grip of the hand is.


Anyway, nice start and I look forward to seeing more of your work.