Sciuridae

I think my Lady Liberty portrait is finished, considerably ahead of schedule...

...but I do have a bad habit of going back and tinkering with paintings after they're 'done'.

I... um... went just a tad retro with Gaderath's Lady Liberty.

I've made my decision.

Or rather, I failed to make it - I just couldn't decide between two of the posters, so I'll do both. Might take a bit longer than planned, though.

I'll put together a picture of Ma'aseruat, because that's *exactly* the type of thing I love to paint.

I'll also make a painting of Lady Liberty - because she's something I wouldn't paint without prompting. Red, white, blue and spandex. I want to see if I can find a 'twist' on it that I find interesting while staying faithful to the original.

(I actually couldn't decide between LL and Sovereign-1, who has much the same concept, but then I noticed S-1's avatar - prior art was the tie-breaker.)

Thanks for all the interest!

I enjoyed the 'Positron Task Force: Tap X target heroes' ability. Classic.

I have to do a lot of work at home this week, and thought it'd be fun to tackle someone else's character.

The catch? I only have time for ONE. Also, my style is... not exactly comic book style.

I've put up some examples of my work on my DA site.

(Note: I am NOT the player of Virtue's Reiraku - I've been using the alias for a decade.)

Because there's only time for one picture (this week, anyway) I'll have to pick and choose between requests - I'll take the one that I think I'm most likely to do justice to.

What I need from you...

* Screenshots
* Tell me about your character - theme, ideas, story, personality... Anything that might help me understand what they're like.
* Everything else being equal, I'd much rather do this for a character who doesn't have art, or doesn't have much art.

I'll look at all posts in the next while and make a decision either today or tomorrow.

Beautiful art style.

I do wonder how many elephants died to provide raw material for a six-foot ivory figurine, though...

That was wonderful!

So many things to like... the humour, the costumes, the 'back in Police Woman 22'...

Great job!

Thanks for the kind words.

I've now finished the picture, changing quite a bit more than the upper right.

The new version is here.

I'm much happier with it now - if only because the colour scheme now more closely follows Kadie's in-game costume.

The composition and colouring are both excellent.

I love the inking (or lack thereof) on his hair.

Publishing to Hypercomics mangled a lot of the text in my entry, so I had to hunt around for ways to fix that...

It turns out that when you edit your entry, there's an option to upload individual JPEGs for each page. They need to be in an exact 8.5 x 11 ratio to work correctly with the page-turning feature.

I ended up taking screenshots of Comic Book Creator, and then using Photoshop to create JPEGs for the mangled pages. Maybe that'll work for you.

Here's a portrait of my Illusion/Storm controller.

I was a bit disappointed at not placing in the Spring Fling costume competition - to cheer myself up I decided to slap together a portrait of Kadie, myself.

I'm not sure whether I like the way the upper right of the image turned out, so I may go back and change that tomorrow.

For now, sleep.

[ QUOTE ]
Oh, here's our entry: Royal Robbery

[/ QUOTE ]

I liked it! Very funny, and some lovely action shots (such as the skull shooting out).

I've already plugged mine, but hopefully this is the finished version.

I really like the line-work. Also, the tilt of the head absolutely makes the piece for me.

I had fun reading it, too.

I'm still tweaking my entry - I'd overlooked some CBC options when I'd put together my first draft.

Seeing what other people do with the program always helps.

I received a reply from Lighthouse:

[ QUOTE ]
You can publish to Hypercomics and send us the URL also. All 3 methods (jpg, pdf or link to Hypercomics) are valid entries.

[/ QUOTE ]

In my own message, I'd mentioned that the trial version of CBC was restricted to publishing to Hypercomics, and asked about the possibility of taking screencaps of CBC pages and turning those to JPEGs (and PDFs). I'd also asked whether we had to submit *one* PDF, or could submit one per page.

Since he didn't say any of the above methods weren't allowed, I'm guessing they're all categorically allowed as fitting within the 'JPEG, PDF or Hypercomics' format requirements.

I've PM'ed Lighthouse. Hopefully he can clear things up for us.

I went the screenshot/crop/save route. I DO find it mind-boggling that they want *one* JPEG for the comic book... don't they mean one for each page? I CAN put them all together, but that'd be a) a largish file and b) a pain to read.

Hrm. Come to think of it... I own a full version of Adobe Acrobat. I use it mostly for conversion from MS Office, but maybe I can find a way to assemble the JPEGs into a PDF file outside of CBC. Photoshop's 'Print to File', maybe?

Beautifully done. I love the distortion effects, and the colours help to give it the feel of a chaotic maelstrom. If I squint I can see a whirlpool filled with wreckage. The window (?) in the very back makes an effective focus.

It looks good.

If you'll allow some constructive nit-picking, the shadowing on the bracers takes a very definite stance on where the light in the picture is coming from... But shadows on the rest of the body (and on the cape) don't always match that.

Thanks! It was mostly done with the trial version of Comic Book Creator.

I used Photoshop for minor touchups and for page layout where CBC didn't have the template I needed. I'd then load the Photoshop page into a CBC splash page.

All bubbles, text boxes, captions and sound effects were done with CBC. I was pleased to find the program makes it easy to import fonts.

Comments very welcome. I've done a minimal amount of retouching on the screenies so far, worried that too much might disqualify me.

Ideally, I'd love to go through and give all the pages a four-colour feel. Preliminary tests are encouraging regarding being able to make the pages look like a late 70s horror comic.

All links are to my DeviantArt site.

As to my DeviantArt name - no relation to the OTHER Virtueite named Reiraku. I've been using that alias since 1996, when I chose it as the name of a major character in a fanfic series I edited.

Cover

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 6

Page 7

Page 8

Native Spanish speaker here.

Let me tell you, right away, that his Spanish is very nearly as bad as his English.

Translating, with profanities bleeped or euphemised...

"Son of a lady of negotiable hospitality."
"I haven't said that you are an effeminate male." (If he means 'No, I said that you...', then he's missing a comma.)
"You speak Spanish."
"Poor person."
"You're a pathetic individual."
"Get a life."
"Wait."
"I hope you'll be happy destroying people."
"You did it, and someone's going to charge you for it."
"Son of the great lady of negotiable hospitality who gave you birth."
"Person who misplaces bowel movements."
"Effeminate male."

While it's nice that you pointed out his plagiarism, I really don't think he's worth anyone's time. In either of his languages.

Do we need to edit out stray players from our screenshots?

For example, suppose that part of the comic takes place in front of City Hall, by the statue of Atlas. There's bound to be a bit of a crowd there at most times. Would we be allowed to include those 'background crowd' player images, or would we have to blur/delete them?

What if we have a crowd scene, period? Say an entire SG or a battle in Siren's Call. Do we need to have the written permission of everyone in the screenshots?

The story I'm thinking of will need a few crowd shots of places that are normally crowded... and I was wondering whether I'd have to create a ton of alts, composite their images together and use some clever cropping, or... well... not.