Morgenstern

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nifty, one day I'll go to one of those Comic-Cons...wouldn't mind getting some quick sketches like yours. Probably stating the obvious, but I like the sure answer I assume you bring a screenshot of your character for them to reference?

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I love artist alleys, and the SDCC alley is well stocked. For that show I put together three collages of cropped screenshots, so about 10-11 images total. Enough to show off the face, costume design, and proportions from several angles.

Proportions take time and practice (great start - it'll come).
Those hands are [u]really[u] well done. I look forward to more from our new star .

The colors arrived today and I am very pleased

Nike's Descent in color

I have a Hero/Villian pair that use a couple off elements I've found helpful.

Both of them use the metal plates belt and some shoulder chains to simulate turquoise. I tend to use blends to give the leather a sense of wear.

I'm pleased with the red plant pattern on the hands to give a bloodsplatered look, but that's more specific to these two characters than the general theme .


The more savage Super Strength/Electricity Brute.

A modernized look for the Invulnerability/Super Strength Tanker.

Other than not mentioning that those aren't exactly work-safe, grats .

You can offer to do commission and link (like you have done). My understanding is you just can't post prices here.

*wolf-whistle* Turbo's takin' it off!

Lol. Very cute. I'm a sucker for Lego .

I just got the final colors on the piece. There were a couple of small changes.

Nike IX vs. the MALTA group (final)

Hope I can get the actual badge for the character soon . "Mistress of Olympus" is a good fit for her .

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Wait, is this conceptual thought experiment PvP? I didn't know this existed.

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Sure . It works better if the folks involved aren't all desperate to win any match up. For example I tend to agree with 'ski - Nike IX vs Gatekeeper = pile of mangled feathers and a trip to the hospital (if Nike is lucky) or having to fight her way out of some Circle of Thorns-like underworld prision map (seems more likely).

Against Turbo-ski it should be pretty funny. Nike's energy bursts are definitely not about precision. She's more of a dive right in type - proc'd fighting pool defenses, 300% regen, self-heal, and two self-healing attacks = charges in where a Viking berserker would give pause. Once there its unleash massive waves of energy in all directions with her PBAoE heal, PBAoE damage, PBAoE toggle hold, and PBAoE click hold (see a theme?). Soon she'll be adding the Nuclear Blast to that particular habbit. The radiation toggle hold has got to be her signature power (loaded with 2 chance to do damage IOs). Against level approriate foes she's been known to just walk in and stand there watching them choke until they collapse. Follow up with two blasts: the little tier one blast with chance to self heal and chance to hold, and X-Ray beam with chance to self heal and chance to build up.

I'm pretty much a proc fiend - I like (all) my powers to do weird stuff. She's got lots of effects on her toggle debuff - 5/6 Darkwatcher and added effects of chance to reduce recharge, chance to reduce regen. First defender I ever played that running solo eats Elite bosses like candy.

What she sucks at is burst damage, and that means victory in 1:1 PvP is right out .

Against regular turbo' I imagine a Jason vs. Freddie moment were Turbo's is getting annoyed at the bio-energy burns (rather than free sauna most rads let off) and that Nike Just. Won't. Die! End with a Heroes-style bit with Nike getting a ice-scythe in the chest and laying there seemingly dead for about 40 minutes until it melts and she can regenerate .

...Or the cops show up. The PPD is fond of Nike as she spends a lot of time healing them during bank robberies and other major deployments of the boys in blue.

Short form is she was a lab tech at Kord Industries and got hit with a lethal dose of Polonium radiation during a (Nemesis Army) raid on the building. Instead of dying, she became a living portal to a pocket dimension of bio-energy. She basically got the benefits of a lifetime membership at the gym, and can allow some of the greenish energy that constantly surounds her to "overflow", releasing beneficial and harmful bursts. She got the wings later as part of a bargain with the Greek Pantheon during a trip to Greece (mixing college credit with tracing a lead on the Nemesis Army). Part-time hero, part-time student at the ol' Paragon U.

She's a Science Origin Radiation/Radiation defender with insanely high regen for a squishy (about 300% of base), and most of her attacks also heal her. She's only got a security clearance of 37, so I suspect you'd mop the floor with her .

I like the black and white one in the first piece and the Redish brown/tan in the second group.

The first is basically white with black accents, which could potentially be improved by shifting from a pure black to a dark grey or dark shade of a different hue - both of which will help utilize the details in the underlying surface which are being lost now.

The second has a warm color scheme which is just bright enough to make use of the available details.

The others tend heavily towards cool colors and/or black, and so my lizard-hindbrain treats them as unnussualy high saturation scenery.

Oh yeah!

Two spots for quick improvment:

On the farther axe blade along the edges that are not the blade, add a second line adjacent to the first and tapering towards the other as it approaches the blade - this will give the axehead a sense of thickness.

Pick one side as the where the light is comming from. Make all the lines that are 'facing away' from the light about 50-100% thinker. Adding line wieght will give a more definite sense of three-dimensionality to the image.

I'm getting a few color previews for the Nike vs. Kronos piece, but I'm gonna wait for the completed colors before I post it. Sufice to say it's mighty.

Adam Withers sent out the inks for his piece today. Colors to follow.

Nike's descent

How could you not be looking forward to your own personal household rendition of the Riders of the Appocolypse?

Open the que when you're ready, Alex. No reason to feel like there's a billion things hanging over you. And you'll be better able to judge your availability and time table if you keep things closer to when you'll actually be able to address them. Nothing would suck more than to have other things come up and feeling guilty or desperate about finishing the last 25% of what's "on the list".

Nice. That brow-line is just fierce. It gives the whole face a real sense of 3-dimensionality.

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Arachnos costumes > Roman costume

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Let me offer an alternative equation:

Arachnos costumes only available to the Epic AT = profoundly lame.

Geeeze, you'd think with the sharing of powersets between villians and heroes (following the total debacle that was villian only costume pieces) it might have sunken in that players aren't particulalry impressed by their arbitrary seperation of content. Put the assets in one pile and let us pick the stuff we want to use ourselves, not dance through some random maze of restrictions...

Adorable!

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Wow, that's a cool piece.

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Woohoo! Greetings, Mr. Shuler. I've enjoyed your work since the little mini-portraits in the WEG Star Wars game. I hope you can take a minute to say so again over on his page. It's fun when the fans go wild, but I imagine he'd enjoy hearing it from a fellow artist .

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It's just screaming to be colored.

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Indeed. I just approved the last of the ink changes this morning. I imagine we'll see the colored version soon .

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Extremely beautiful. This is the kind of quality I would expect for the price range.

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Thank you, Suichiro. *teasing* I always figured her outfit would be far too black for your tastes */teasing*

Honestly I don't spend that much real often, so I'm more of a "That's the quality I really hope for when plunking down that kind of money" person. This was my second piece from him so confidence level was high. I'm thinking about asking him to do some of my WoW characters next, but money permiting, I'd love to have him take on a Nike piece again sometime.

I have one other piece I'm trying to get ordered this month that will be sort of the ultimate glee for me if the artist has the time to accept the commision during the show he's attending. He may be booked up though, so I'm trying not to over anticipate... *fingers crossed*

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Link please?

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JCSD's deviant art page is here~
http://josephcaesarsd.deviantart.com/

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sweet, that piece has a whole lotta stuff that makes it great, the camera angle, the face emotion, the detail on the costume the pose, whole lotta good

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*nod* My description for the shot was really simplistic compared to what he delivered. He'd drawn her once before and I sent a few Gunslinger screenshots. Hang on, I think I've still got it.

*rumage*

Here it is:

"I'd like for her to be airborne, arched back like someone about to make a 2-handed basketball slam dunk. She holds a mottled green ball of energy about 2 feet across over her head, about to slam it down on the gunslinger in the left foreground, who is shooting back at her with both pistols. She's looking pissed off and has a green aura radiating from her whole body, but becoming stronger around her arms and bleeding into the ball of energy she's gathered."

That's it. I had no thoughts for the background at all. When I first saw the inks, the thing that caught my eye was her hands. That is a really unusual angle and the fingers are incredible. I also really like the little details around the edges of the white parts of the costume that help make them look like something worn/pulled-on over the underlying black parts. A little lip. An occasional wrinkle. Pure squee .

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That's a great great peice

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He just keeps 'wow'ing me. This one was a little more expensive than the first one he did of Nike IX for me (multiple characters after all). Seeing where he went with it I've got -no- complaints. That Gunslinger in the foreground is unmistakable to a CoX player, I'd say.

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Do you plan to color it or have it colored?

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I asked for one small change to the inks (I wanted the Gunslingers' hats to have broader brims - more cowboy, less fedora). After that JCSD will be coloring the piece also.

I like that one too.

Alex, I'll look you up once your que is open again