HeroMachine Character Portrait Creator

Character Of The Week: Linea24- Guide Arthasi Cerca

Posted on September 18, 2015 by JR19759 | Comments Off

This weeks COTW was very tough to choose. We had exceptional work from classic 'machiner's like AMS, Vampyrist and Vengeance, the usual high standards of COTW stalwarts like Anarchangel and Stulte and stunners from lesser recognised 'machiners in Angel of Chaos and Lef. We even had the return of the legend that is dblade. But I ended up choosing this piece by Linea because it had something that the others just lacked slightly. If you look at the Also Awesome section down below, all the pictures are quite static and standard pose, and I'm not belittling any of these guys in any way, I can't pose to save my life. But if we look at Linea's here, that raised arm on a sideways pose, the lowering of the hat so it covers one eye, the flowing dress. It sets the whole thing off. This picture has a life of it's own. The fact you can only see one of the characters eyes and that costume hides most of her face bar a slight glimpse of the top of her smiling mouth, gives the character such a mysterious and mischievous personality, it's hard not to love it. And that gets it character of the week for me.

Gallery: Linea24's Astra Universe

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Posted in Character of the Week

Kaldath’s Caption Contest #72: Results

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Kaldath | Comments Off

Last week I asked for you all too caption this GIF:

And the top five entrants as judged by me are:

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GuyGenesis

Deadpool “Everyone treats Deadpool like a door mat! ANY ONE ELSE WANT TO WIPE THEIR FEET?!”

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dreadyacht

Deadpool: What a lovely day! Nothing can g-

Hulk: Deadpool! Am I getting warm?

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William A. Peterson

“Okay, so Hulk was mad about that putting his hand in a bowl of water while he was asleep thing! But, THIS is so far from his usual stomping grounds that he’ll NEVER…”

{STOMP!!!!}

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Nug

“I am one with the wind and sky

Let it go, Let It G-”

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ams

“Mondays are the best day of the week! I said, Mondays are the best day of the w……UGHHHH”

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And your Winner is ..............................

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Posted in Caption Challenges, Challenges

Pop Quiz Results

Posted on September 14, 2015 by djuby | Comments Off

Four great entries this week.

Nug used some very innovative pieces to come up with cool - sort of retro - design.

Love the murky look of Vampyrist's entry; great colour choices.

The shading and very effective use of just a few items cleverly repeated makes Stulte's entry top notch.

And finally Herr D chose a whimsical approach - nice colouring and textures.

And this week's winner - and the winner of a custom made Captain design inspired by their submarine is...

Nug!

Join me in congratulating Nug, and all the other entrants. Nug's prize will be posted on my Forum page and on Deviant Art when I get it done...with any luck, no later than Friday.

See you Saturday.

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Posted in Pop Quiz

Character Design Contest ♯139- Colourful

Posted on September 14, 2015 by JR19759 | Comments Off

So, very simple idea for this weeks contest. What I want you guys to create is a superhero or villain that has a colour themed name and costume. Examples of this would be guys like Green Lantern, Red Tornado, Black Panther etc. so the characters name must include the main colour of their costume. Easy.

As per usual, no limits on entries and the contest will close at midnight Saturday (blog time). Please read the contest rules before entering, 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.

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Posted in Challenges, Character Design Challenges

Image

CDC Question + Extra Posts?

Hey guys, JR here and I've got a few quick questions for you concerning my posts on the blog. Firstly, the weekly Character Design Contests seem to be dropping in popularity. Over the last couple of months we only seem to be averaging less than 20 individual participants each contest. Sure some of those participants may enter multiple times (Cliff and Outcast are notable for this, certainly recently), but last year we'd get at least 25-30 each week on average, and that's before we even get to the polls, which used to get no less than 180 votes each week last year and frequently broke the 200 vote mark (last weeks vote was the highest we've had in a month and it got 130 votes). And I'd be interested to know why this is. I don't want to stop doing the CDC's and will try to do everything in my power to keep them going, but I don't want it to get to a point where we're just having the same old people in the polls, not because they were the best entries, but because no-one else entered. And while we're on the subject of the CDC's, if anyone has any suggestions for themes, please leave them below. It would help a lot for those times when I've been busy and haven't had time to come up with a theme for the week (which almost happened this week, I actually put together this weeks contest an hour before it went up, which is late for me as I'd usually have it all sorted the night before).

And on that note, there is obviously a lot less blog content of late, due to both Kaldath and my own IRL job commitments. I know Kaldath asked about volunteers for new blog authors a while back, but that has gone quiet. I'm not in a position to give anyone authorship permission and I've not exactly got a vast expanse of free time at the moment, so what do? Well, it was suggested to me yesterday that I bring the Power User Profiles back. Great, I literally have to do nothing except receive an email and post it to the blog for that one, so it would be viable. Only problem is, we could only come up with one new person to profile. So that's where you guys come in. If you can think of anyone you'd like to see profiled, leave them in the comments and if I see at least 5 I like, then I'll make it happen.

So yeah, comment please. It'd really help out a lot.

And with that, JR out.

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Posted on September 14, 2015 by JR19759 in Meta, Open threads

Character Design Contest ♯138 (Am I Evil?) Poll

Posted on September 13, 2015 by JR19759 | Comments Off

[polldaddy poll="9073915"]

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Posted in Challenge Favorites

Character Design Contest ♯137 (It’s All Greek To Me) Winner

Posted on September 13, 2015 by JR19759 | Comments Off

It's interesting what people chose to depict in this weeks challenge. Most people chose to show Greek mythology, which is understandable, as it's the most well known aspect of ancient Greek life. However, only two people depicted Greek arts and culture, and through the wonders of an ancient Greek invention, democracy, it was one of those who triumphed. So congratulations to Gingersnap, whose depiction of Sappho won this weeks vote.

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Posted in Challenge Favorites

Pop Quiz – All You Need Is Imagination.

Posted on September 12, 2015 by djuby | Comments Off

On September 12, 1966 The Beatles received a gold record for "Yellow Submarine."

Your Pop Quiz challenge this time around is to create your very own, customized yellow submarine.

There is a prize this week: the winning submarine will get a captain designed by me. (Not the greatest prize...but hey...it's something!)

There is no poll. The winner is chosen by me.

You only get one entry so be creative, and above all else, have fun!

All entries must be in JPG or PNG form (BMPs are too big), posted to a publicly accessible website (like the HeroMachine forums,ImageShack, PhotoBucket, or whatever);

Entries must be made as a comment or comments to this post, containing a link directly to the image and the character name;
The image must be new and designed specifically for the Pop Quiz;
No copyrighted characters please – they will be deleted.
Please name your filesas [your name]-[character name].[file extension] before you upload it. So DiCicatriz, for instance, would save his “Bayou Belle” character image as DiCicatriz-BayouBelle.png.
Please make the link go directly to the image(like this) and not to a hosting jump page (like this). See this post on how to get the direct link for most sites.

This contest will close at 9pm Eastern on Sunday, September 13th.

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Posted in Pop Quiz, Uncategorized

Open Critique Day #31

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Linea24 | Comments Off

How this goes: You post a work of yours, finished or WIP, and then others give you critiques on your work. I do not mind if you post non-HM pictures or piece of writing. Just make sure that you only post pictures that are your own design and not any that are copyrighted or based off of copyrighted characters.

Even this is called Open Critique Day, I allow (even encourage!) for you guys to post and discuss on this for the weekend until 11:59 pm Sunday.

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Posted in Open Critique Day

Character Of The Week: Stulte- Hubrect And Ima

Posted on September 11, 2015 by JR19759 | Comments Off

The last two weeks have been very good for what I like to call the "second wave" of heromachine creators, especially those coming back off hiatus. Last week saw the return of Jeimuzu, Linea24 and the subject of this week's COTW, Stulte. Stulte is one of those creators who no-one could ever imitate, his style is so unique, a wonderful mixture of steampunk, genuine Victoriana and fantasy that is blended so seamlessly by fantastic costumes, character design and shading. Just look at the ancillaries and accessories on this picture to see how much thought and attention to detail goes into these pictures. Magnificent.