Rizerax

Lol... technically, I would say "needs" glasses, no. But as we all know, according to Hollywood, wearing silverish-reflective sun glasses indoors adds 10 points of awesome. :P

Thanks for all the advice everyone. I think I'm going to follow bAss_ackwards' suggestion, and call this done, but take note of all the critiques given, and apply those to the next piece I make. I may come back to this one eventually, and adjust the contrast in the background, or even make a real background. I do agree that the perspective on some parts is off and the pose could've been better, but I'm probably not going to adjust that since it would require redrawing most of the picture, and I think at that point, it would be more efficient to start over.

And for those of you wanting an easier time making chain I used this tutorial. I also have some other tutorials saved under my favorites on Deviantart that may be of use to someone.

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I would be interested and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

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I'm thinking this could possibly be a typo, but I don't have a newsletter. I actually update my DeviantArt account as soon as I finish something, so the best way to keep up with any new art I make, is to create an account with DeviantArt (it's free) and just add me to your watch list.

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Well hey there Riz!! *huggleglomp*


heheh i love Delilah!! We need more dead lock options for our toons roo!


Great stuff and also it's so cool to see you posting here! Please don't go away!

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*squee hug!*

I don't want to go away. This is very good... I've come to the conclusion that WoW is the antithesis to my art... So less WoW, more CoX.

Oh, and I did want to ask, do you guys people would be interested in stuff like this for their characters?

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Wow nice!

Erm.. Thackary's kinda hot...

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LoL. Meg thought his pants were kinda low, and my first thought was "and why are we complaining...?" I also ended up asking someone on Skype the other day if it's bad that I think my own character is hot.

*edited because Riz is having an issue with spelling

Coh is conducive to making art pt 2 – More art

Ok, so still waiting on script... so in the mean time, here's some character mock ups for the story. These are in addiction to this prep piece( Inks/ Finished) for the comic... and I've posted 3 new arts with in a week... must be a record for me.

We have Thackary, my fire/dual blades tanker, and Delilah, clerk at Pandora's Box. I started both of these mid-day yesterday, so I'd say both have about 4-5 hours put into each.

Here are the pics, in their different stages of completion – I'm sure you guys will notices where some changes took place as the progressed.

Thackary Pencil
Thackary Ink
Thackary Colored

Delilah Pencil
Delilah Ink
Delilah Colored

I must say, I absolutely love Delilah's hair. I need to create more characters with dread locks.

So what do we think of the tie dye? Too much?

No, really, it is. I’ve lost myself in WoW for the last few months, and obviously haven’t don’t much in the way of art-stuff. I do enjoy the game, and the fact that my fiance also plays is big draw, but I am rarely left with any desire to draw afterwards, and I tend to get bored with the constant farming.

So Sunday night, I decide to start up my account again, and after a few hours of enjoying the Skype conversation, and busting bad guy chops, I really felt the need to work on some art for my characters. I’m still waiting for the script from Meg, so I can start working on the comic - and yes it will be a full fledged comic, penciled, inked, and colored. I figured it would be a good idea to sketch out and tackle any issues with the main characters now, rather than with in the pages of the comic. I can figure out what cosmetic changes I wanted, and how I wanted to render some items.

So here’s what I have done. This is about 5 hours of work thus far, and I’m still not quite happy with it. Meg and I figured out the main problem is there is no center of interest. When I sketched this on paper, I didn’t not imagine his swords being on fire. It was simply a character sketch to practice drawing the armor. However, I think the fire looks so kickin‘, that I really don’t want to get rid of it, nor do I think toning it down will help. I tried to make the eyes glow a bit more, but I’m not sure how much more I can do. The chains are also a bit of an issue…I wanted to find an easy way to render chains (they are such a pain to draw by hand), and this was also an experiment of a cheap/easy way to render them, mostly with a Photoshop brush.

So what do you guys think? Should I leave it as is, and just mark it as practice/experiment, or do you think it’s worth saving? Also I was, and still am running a fever while working on this, so I don’t think this is quite up to my usual standards.

Yay! I can post again! (I didn't have an active account)

I'm glad I could make people smile, and for those interested, the story Meg's suppose to be writing is Thackary's origin (the fire tanker) and this is a preview for the comic that we're making of Thackary's scary costume...still in pencil stage, and missing quite a bit of details, like the bio-organic armor, and chains across the chest. There will be evil demon fire in the background.
*looking forward to coloring evil demon fire*
yay!

Hey Torroes Prime,

I know you said you want be contacted personally, rather than on the forums, but I thought a few of these tips would be helpful for everyone too. This isn't so much aimed at Torroes, but at everyone that wants free art.

I would watch the timing of the requests. The art forums aren't as fast moving as some of the other forums. Don't fret if you don't get an interested reply within one or two days. A lot of that has to do with how often artists look at these forums. I don't know about other artists, but I don't look at the CoH forums everyday, frankly I'm lucky if I look at them once a week, and I don't even read all the posts. Sending notes is obviously the better way to go, because I got the one you sent me the day after you sent it, rather than seeing a post a week later. Although, posting on the forums is still a good idea, since another artist (that you may not of thought to contact) could see the post as well.

I know your budget it tight, but everyone's budget is tight, and that's part of the reason people don't want to do things for free. If it weren't for picking up extra hours at work, and a few commissions, I wouldn't be able to buy any x-mas presents. Keep in mind that if an artist does do free work for you, have a lot of patience with them. I don't know how you are to work with, but just in case, don't push deadlines. Real life work and commissions come first, then personal life, and personal art work may even go before free art.

I don't know how many people realize this, but I don't know any artist, through the web, people I went to college with, or real life friends, that are living solely on their art work. Sometimes I think people forget, that while I would love to just be an artist, in this economy, it doesn't pay the bills. We do have real life, mundane, jobs, and even commission art has to be worked around my 50+ hours at a warehouse. I'm not complaining. I've learned to live with this, and it doesn't really bother me. I just feel it needs to be said, but, to be fair, the CoH fandom has been the best and most favorable to artist that I've been a part of.

You already stated that you would like to actually pay for the work, but you don't have the resources. I would definitely let the artist know about your situation. Trades aren't a horrible thing either. I'm just not personally motivated by CoH trades. I have enough friends online, that if I really want something, I can just ask (although they usually get a little bit of fun art in trade, like how I got wings for Rizerax .) I would also try to offer other skills you may have. Do you know about web design? Even if you don't know about web design, do you have contacts for good deals on hosting? Are you a good writer and willing to write a story for them about one of their characters? If you happen to live close to the artist, would you be willing to rake leaves or something like that? You can always ask the artist if they need anything, and they just might need something you can provide, but never thought to offer.

In addition, it's the week of Thanksgiving, and people have a lot on their plate (pun totally intended) – traveling, buying x-mas presents, working extra hours to buy x-mas presents, and this is a really busy time of year for nearly every business. If you don't hear anything back, don't worry. I would recommend waiting until after the holidays to ask again. People's schedules will mellow out, and they may be more receptive to doing things for free, since the holiday expenses are behind them.

Good luck!

Thanks everyone. I really enjoyed working on this piece. It was finished amazingly quick for me. I just started working on it, and it just got there.

Oh, and I'm just doing a mass thank you here for the +favs, comments, and watches on DeviantArt.

So, I sat down, and wanted to draw something, and I got to thinking. I've drawn other people's characters realistically, but I've never drawn my own like that.

I decided to take a stab at it.

At first, I didn't think I was going to get that far from the original, just tweak some of the stuff - give her a longer skirt, add length to her sleeves, adjust the horns, etc. Well, I started going at it, and she changed a little more than just that, but I think the spirit of the CoH costume is still with her.

I also say it was fun confusing everyone on skype. Not only did I get to confuse them when I was part of the conversation, but they couldn't find me in game, they got to listen to me bliss about drawing sparkles and the bling on Riz's jewelry. I don't care if it sounds stupid, I LOVE drawing sparkles!

The Picture

There was a costume contest last night in Pocket D. Maybe I should try to submit this as my picture, instead of the screen cap they took :P

(those have got to be the best female abs I have ever rendered. )

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Looks like they are catching up. Time to slot your travel powers!

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I'm can fly AND teleport! Yet they still catch me! Wait! Maybe once I hit 50, I'll actually stand a chance at escaping. Although, that means teaming with them so I do level. I'm doomed.

Beyond that I'm actually working on some CoH art right now. I have one commission in the works. I'm working a short cartoon that I've been waiting on some of the people to hop online, so I can get screen caps. I may just substitute out those characters for people I already do have references for. I also realized Sunday night that even though I've drawn Rizerax cartoonish, she's never really gotten a full non-cartoony render. That's about 3/4 of the way done.

Oops. yup, I did forget some one. Although I bet you guys are glad I drew one of Sainrith's alts...It was either Russia Girl, or Sainrith with no pants...

STAMPEDE!

This community seems to really love their artists.

I am the little blue demon.

From the top:
Karo
Megumi Yamato
Mekkanos
Mighty Lornac
Plasma Stream
Thor's Assassin

It never made much sense to me for the highlights to *not* be there. It just was more logical that glowie eyes emit light, and there is no way that light doesn't reflect off the rest of the face.

Besides, I think special effects like that are a lot of fun to draw.

I'm very glad I could bring that emotion to life. I had a lot of fun working on this picture, especially the background. I based it off of some pictures of the Eagle Nebula, and yes the pretty colors were fun .

Is it too late for me to sign up as well?

It's looking good so far. The new version is a good improvement. I would make a suggestion: When you take your screen caps, make sure you are in good lighting. What you have now is ok, but next time, I'd try to be in a place that was brighter. You can also add things to the artist guide that you would like to see on the character, but character creation doesn't allow. Like you said you make him as skinny as you could (an awesome thing to include in you guide), but you can also say, you made him as skinny as you could, but envisioned him skinnier than that. Just, don't go crazy with it, and most artists should be willing to work with little changes like that.

And Rizerax brings more art!

This a quick sketch I did of @chaoke's Peacebringer character (Justice Server). I needed some screen caps for a picture I'm working on, and Chaoke was willing to pose for me, so this is a little thank you to her/him (MMO's make telling gender difficult), especially because he/she answered to a random tell I sent out in the Justice for All channel, asking for models.

I did not draw in the glowies because I wanted a reference for the body structure. I'm probably going to do a few more studies of the before I'm ready to draw the picture this was originally intended for, and I'm willing to post them on DevArt if there seams to be any interest from other people. I don't know, would that help any fellow artists? Or do other artist have any studies they've already drawn that they think would help? *shrug* I found it pretty difficult to try and draw something that was glowing and transparent.

I don't have a 50 yet, so obviously I can't have my own Peacebringer, so to those of you that do have one, how does it look?

*Quick note* From my last post, a lot of people had trouble reading part of the image, and I really think it's because they were looking at the small version of the image (to me it looked fine large, but on the small version, it was nearly unreadable). This is just an FYI to let people know, if they didn't already, that you can click on artwork on devart, and you will view a larger version of the image. This helps out if you can't make out a part of the image due to dev art shrinking it.

Well, since Meg's shown up. I suppose I should start using

[image]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v309/Ayamai/artslave.png[/image]

as my signature... If I can get my signature to work w/ BBC code. I know I'm not that scatter brained that I should be able to handle the code, but it keeps showing up in code rather than showing the image...

*muttering to myself*...jeeze does this not work in preview mode...I'm not seeing it...I'm having technical difficulties here *head desk* I'm just leaving my post as is, maybe somebody can tell me what I'm doing wrong...

Thank you!

I guess Meg's speech bubble could be hard to read. It looks fine to me, but when I clicked on the picture to make it the smaller version, it does get fuzzy, so I see what you're talking about. (I have my DevArt set up so pages automatically load w/ the image full size. The default is the small image loads first. Perhaps if you clicked on the pic to make it full size that would help?)

As far as getting arts from me? Meg told me to answer this question with many $$$$'s, but I'm also open to the whole barter system as well. I'm working on getting a pricing list of sorts going, or a page of "stuff I'd like gifted to me". I suppose best answer is pm or email (preferably email for this type of thing) me with what you'd like and we'll work something out.

Who's TA?

Alright this is my first post on the forums, and since I'm an artist, I felt it only right that my first post be with some CoH art.

So, before you guys go "Yay art!" here's a quick little back story about where this came from. When I first started playing CoH, my first character, Rizerax, was a tiny little blue demon. She was as short as I could make her. I ended up playing alot with my friend, Megumi Yamato. Meg, is freakin huge. I think she said she was like 7'6", and I got the feeling that she got a kick out of being that tall.

So what did I do? I created Thackary, for the solo purpose of being taller than Meg. I maxed out the height and leg scales on character creation, and even gave him the spiky hair to top it off.

I imagine this to be the in-game moment when he gets to rub it in Meg's face that he's now the tallest in the Super Group.

As far as the art goes, I am absolutely thrilled with how Thackary's neck and chest came out... *he is so hot* (ok, bad pun for a fire/dual blade tanker... hehe). While I am very pleased with how the entire color stage of this came out, in my original pencils/ink, I think the problem I always had with Meg, was she looked far older than the player or I ever envisioned her. And I think Thackary's forehead is too short.

Comments, critiques, always welcome, and please check out the rest of my deviant art page, I have a version of this pic up with out the speech bubbles if you guys want to see.