goldbricker

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Bear with me, I'm always more than a little nervous when showing new people my drawings.


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Me too. Actually I'm kind of a hypocrite in that I've been pointedly criticizing a lot of art I see on these boards, but have constitution no more hardy than the flimsy paper stock on which I put my own art to be submitted for peer-pressured approval.

It can be a struggle to deal with that I know, but it's still important to try to find ways to break through that and get your stuff out of just your own personal space, even if you're not entirely ready or comfortable, and even if you get burned on that sometimes.

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First off is a older drawing I did of my ice/ice Blaster fighting my mind/psi Dom.

MJB vs Seraphim


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As an art consumer, one of my biggest wants is pieces with internal consistency. That a style is maintained the same way in all parts of a piece, or that a meta idea holds throughout. I see this quality in this piece right off the bat. The wing feathering is the same meta-stylism as the ice sword. This may seem silly, but man does that make me happy looking at this piece. Ditto with how the styling on MJB's hair is the same as the styling on Seraphim's chest symbol and chest costume details, and so on and so forth.

I really don't care what the style actually is, so long as I can trust that the entire piece holds that same style throughout while it's trying to shape the subjects into something interesting. Thank you for posting it.

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Well, I'm getting back into drawing humanoids after many years of doing nothing but tribal tattoos and regular designs.

Deaths Dance and Friend


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In its current form it is quite like a tattoo design. Efficient detailing, simple and interesting silhouette, solid fills.

Interestingly, many painters when planning out a new piece prefer to set up a first layer in much the same way. They would separate out areas of the canvas into blocks, painting each block with a single pale color foundation, suitable for the tone of the subjects they plan to detail there in later layers.

Of course, it's not reasonable to assume you're really going to go with that kind of dedicated painter's technique with your piece. But it's nice to note that your practice with tattooing has set you up well for learning and working with more progressive techniques if you feel like it.

And even if you just want to stick with CoH fanart for now, it's looking good so far. Thanks for the post.

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She was, yes. Now she's a refugee/performer/heroine on Primal Earth.

Originally rolled on Triumph, ported to Virtue.


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Poor Praetorian Earth. If TJ came to Primal obviously a new evil of equal proportion has taken root there, and TJ looks like she's got a lot of proportions to fill.

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This is a piece for War Patriot's Villain group "The Confederate States of America".
CSoA illustration


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Excellent piece! Obviously a lot of care went into a lot of separate-but-coincidentally-momentarily-intersecting threads, and there's a successful cohesion to the whole of this intersection. I really like the softening technique used on the far away smoke column, (the non-softened smoke patch in the top center looks a little less nice when forced into comparison).

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Comments welcome.


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Not that it's all that noticeable, but the big guy's left arm seems to be in a confusing spot. It's a bit scrawny and non-goliath-like, and it's almost pseudo-grasping the flagpole. It almost comes across as mutant third arm of the foreground villainess. Perhaps you might consider next time posing this sharp-dressed guy's free hands in dapper ways, such as fiddling with his tie or tipping his fedora?

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or partially - the gentleman pictured belongs to another person and is not from the game. Any constructive crit. appreciated. I'm already aware of some problems (background could use work and they look like they'll slide off the roof... that's supposed to be a broadsword, not a katana... etc.ad nauseum)

image on deviantArt


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My first impression is that the color palette is too crowded. The sheer amount of detailing and color clashing makes for a significant challenge to the viewer's ability to decipher the artistry.

I might suggest you review your setting and look for ways to introduce more neutral colors in parts of the scene that you feel aren't as important for attention. The bright green and yellow trim on the roof for example are pulling focus to a mostly irrelevant element of the piece.

It seems the real key elements of the piece are Betty's delicate hand on Tron's shoulder, Tron's smirky facial expression, and Betty's relaxed hopeful glance to the sky. But the eye is drawn to the color clash between Betty's yellow stockings and her rich blue skirt, and the boldness of Tron's red chestplate vs. his metal abdomen detailing. As well as the aforementioned roof highlighting.

The sky is set up in a way where a neutral white is at least somewhat framing Tron's head, which helps with focusing attention somewhat. But the entirety of the sky seeming so turbulent, (and the rich blues right up next to some neon green roof detail), also undermine the effect a bit.

I think it's a well done piece, but definitely shows some room for improvement in terms of color palette and layout. Given how this piece shows no fear of using color, all it should take now is some practice and playing around with the idea of deemphasizing less important areas with neutrals and emphasizing important areas with bolder colors and detailing.

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http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/8...1823321xr2.jpg

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Okay I must asked, where was that taken...


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If I recall correctly, there is a rift closing mission on one of the Praetorian arcs that took you to a world with tons of burning terrain huge patches of smoking, flaming ground.


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I've taken a couple of pics like that myself. If I recall correctly I used Steel fire buildings on hero side, and the Arch-A boss room in the Code Merlin flashback arc villain side. (That's a really cool mission map all said.)

My favorite pic of my own toons is the one I use for my forum avatar. I took it in in the first few months of CoH and kept it ever since.

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Currently, its a work in progress - there's several things I need to fix - but I thought i'd post it here for youse all to see.

http://brangzomovia.deviantart.com/a...e-WIP-88520372

the things *I* see are: That big shoulder is, well, too big and seems detached. The amulet around his neck needs to be more centered on his chest. The arm holding the scepter is just off. I need to work on his face - he looks too young. And I still need to do the lion rampant emblem on his chest.


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The shoulder by itself looks good, and looks good with the arm, but I agree it seems overproportioned next to the proportions of the torso. Is it really the case that the shoulder is the odd element out? It's possible to interpret this as the rest of the body is too lean. The legs in particular, well they look like a fit man's legs, but not necessarily a superhero's legs. Maybe it's worth asking yourself again 'Do I want an exaggerated superhero look for this piece (like the shoulder), or do i want to assertively accentuate a realistic athleticism style instead (like the torso and legs)?' If you're being inspired by Juggertha, who is well known for an expert style on the exaggeration side of this question, maybe you want to keep the shoulder and scale up the rest of the body to match.

It's ok for an unpinned, freely-hanging amulet to be a bit askew on a chest if the torso is posed in a contortion as this is. A bit of delicate balance and skew gives a nice touch of realism in a piece like this. I'd suggest you can probably treat the amulet as a low-priority touch up; it should work out ok as is.

The arm holding the scepter isn't that off actually. The hand and fingers are a bit overproportioned, and the hand positioning relative to the forearm positioning suggests the wrist is at an extreme, at-the-limits-of-natural-flexibility angle, but doesn't really cross that line. You can perhaps try changing the elbow position a little bit higher and draw the forearm more foreshortedly, effectively rotating the forearm/elbow/bicep combo upwards about 5-10 degrees so the forearm appears more at a perpendicular line to the line of the scepter, (which would hypothetically look more natural, and a more 'tensed muscle, ready-for-action' pose). It would probably help if you try to strike this pose yourself in a mirror, and slowly move your arm around and pay attention to how it looks.

I see what you mean about a young-looking face. One way to youthen up a face is by drawing a disproportionately-large forehead, (if you take a look at many baby pics, you'll find this trait fairly common). In your piece you do have a significant forehead that's additionally been made a center of attention from just the way the shading of elements around it is framing it.

Now quoting from Juggertha:
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Looks good, but his eyes seem a litle too low on the face.


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If I may suggest an alternative diagnosis, I would argue that it's not that the eyes are too low, but that the chin and the lower part of the face do not extend far enough. The eyes do seem on a reasonable line with the ears, but there's this big shadow swallowing the chin. If you expand out the nose-mouth-cheeks-chin area a bit, and figure out a way not to let the throat-to-chin shadow overdominate the area, you'll probably get a better balance against the eyes and the 'youthful' forehead.

I like the double-subject mirror effect aesthetically, the pose and the way it leans works well with it. I know you're only doing that for diagnostic reasons, but it might be worth keeping for the final piece.

Keep up the good work!

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I've been working on some non-COH stuff recently with an eye towards DC and Marvel, but it's still comic-related and still 'fan art'ish, so I figured I'd go ahead and link to it here.


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Yes please. Your work has consistently been entertaining and inspiring. I'll take as much as I can get, even the not-so-on-topic pieces.

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There will probably be several other posts this week.


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Yay!


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The HUNTRESS


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Awesome! What a great pose for her... it might be the best pose I've ever seen for that character, including in her books or on tv. I've particularly impressed by the attention to detail on the slightly-diffused reflection of the moonshine off of her cape.

Hmm...

Is it just me, or is the lighting, kind of, well, unnaturally bright for the setting?

I mean, it almost seems like she's being bathed in like 4 surrounding spotlights or something. It's great to see all that amazing detail in the subject, but it's almost like she's actually in the daytime and the night scene behind her is some movie set backdrop prop. Maybe she's in the theatre district or something where there are big signs full of lights around her but not quite in the line of sight of the viewpoint. It certainly doesn't seem like the moonshine is the primary light source.

Sorry, I don't mean to get overly critical. I think it's great regardless.

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HERE is a shot of him from the front, in his lair. Sorry I don't have one from the back.

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One important detail about his back facade is that his cape flows from beneath the spiderarm base attached to his back, instead of from his shoulders over the spiderarm base as might be more naturally expected. The overall effect is surprisingly similar to a skirt.

I don't have a screenshot, but I had star on a lrsf a couple days ago and that caused me to be in a position to see his back, and that cape placement caught me by surprise.

Wow. The torso from just below the collarbone down through the lower hips is incredible. The subtle twist and contortion of the waist combined with a supple rounded female thigh is super-believable.

The arms to the shoulder, the legs from the feet to the knees, and the head seem flatter and less-realized in comparison. The effect is almost like a classic Escher print where 2-d animals start pulling out of a page into a full 3-d form. The result here gives a bit of a chuckle, but even though it's obviously not perfect, it is very appealing and the potential for your future improvement is somewhat exciting.

More practice! I want to see more.

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Out of curiosity, what do you think I should try to improve on in my art next?
<ul type="square">[*]Females, Not enough Va Va Voom [/list]

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It seems to me there's been a bit of a backlash against aggressively-objectified depictions of the female form lately. There's been more call for the depiction of intelligence and competence and common sense in women. (It seems plausible the strong push to depict the non-supermodel image of Hillary Clinton as a capable leader for the free world has a lot to do with it.)

I would suggest that it's still viable to look to improve your female form skills, but instead of the Va Va Voom factors, focus more on realistic female forms that still look capable of putting their minds towards achieving physical feats. You could review subjects such as Amanda Waller, or various makeover show subjects/hosts like Paige Davis on Trading Spaces, or various athletes like the current French Open tennis contestants or the upcoming Beijing Olympics participants.

Still, this wouldn't be my first choice as to what you should pursue.

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<ul type="square">[*]Hair, It needs to look more natural [*]Backgrounds/Scenery , face it man the same old white background is kinda bland [*]Angle, it's time we saw from behind, above, below and what ever other angles there are [/list]

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I don't think any of these require intensive focus at this time. It's fairly straightforward to introduce easy and slight improvements to each in parallel to whatever else you focus on.

Hair can be slightly improved by treating it more like a shiny fabric, and getting the shine highlight more or less correct.

Backgrounds can be slightly improved by adding a single geometric shape to in part frame the foreground layout. If you review Juggertha's deviantart site you should see several examples where he plays around with this technique. When Juggie first started doing this his art immediately took on another dimension of appeal, (and it was already pretty awesome).

Angle and layout can be played with in a narrow field to nice effect. Extreme angles are more often ugly than not. But basic training exercises in this area can consist of drawing towers of stacked simple tables as if from slightly above or slightly below (or both).

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<ul type="square">[*]Animals, time to go on to non human creatures [/list]

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An intriguing idea. This can indeed be a valuable avenue of research and improvement. However, these kinds of subjects tend to lead you to avenues of expression far away from these boards, and I for one don't want to lose you.

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<ul type="square">[*] Facial Expressiongs, we want to see more smiling, anger, and other emotions [/list]

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This gets my vote. Detailed and expressive facial expressions seems to be the next trend in art and animation. There are a host of recently released and upcoming games touting dynamic facial animation and expression as exciting innovations (Street Fighter IV is one example). Arguably, cinema lately has been doing more closeups and less symbolism for conveying character feelings.

I might suggest reviewing the Justice League work of Keith Giffen (with J.M. DeMatteis) for a good example of superheroes with attention to detail on facial expressions.

But in any case, any of the options you pursue will probably work out ok. What matters is that you love what you do with it.

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Here's my side by side, with some quick photoshopping... hope it helps.


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There does seem to be some small proportionality discrepancies here and there. To some degree they can be argued as an artistic effect but they can possibly be softened without sacrificing much of the effect.

The one example that catches my eye is the leading arm's hand, the planted foot, and the costume buckles next to each. Assuming the buckle on the ankle is roughly the same size as the buckle on the wrist, that would suggest the feet (being proportionally only slightly bigger than the buckle) are tiny compared to the hand (being proportionally significantly bigger than the buckle).

In LJ's version she has upped the size of the foot, (and deemphasized the foreleg costuming) which I might argue gives a more natural illusion to this proportioning without losing much in the dynamic foreshortening effect.

Another area would be the tiny hand of the trailing arm. It's supposed to be exaggeratedly smaller of course, but it's so extreme in this case it gives more of an illusion that this runner has a bit of Elongated Man in him, and is stretching his arm across several yards behind him. Upping the size of that hand a bit should reduce this effect.

Finally I'd (reluctantly) like to point out the pelvic area appears slightly out of natural position. The upper torso is rotated towards his left arm, but his pelvic area appears rotated the other way towards his right leg, while both his legs appear to be oriented straight onto the audience viewpoint (LJ's version is quite straight on, while the original's trailing leg was slightly off center towards the pelvic position).

This contortion is possible in the human body, but it is somewhat unnatural, and commonly expresses that the pelvis is a bit disjointed from the torso and legs (which themselves seem to be cooperating).

Ideally, you'd want to try to convey not a rotation of the pelvis, but an unusual division of placement between each half of the pelvis. The buttock on the planted leg would generally be taut and pushing up against the top of the leg bones, while the buttock on the relaxed leg would be dropped more and curved over a larger area to support the way that leg is trying to collapse for counterbalance.

However, it's very hard from this pose and viewpoint to convey this information properly. About the most you can try to do is attempt to rotate the lead leg slightly towards the runner's left, and show off a bit more of the inseam of that leg, and taper the top of the inseam of the lead leg more to allow for more room for the crotch (similar to LJ's treatment, although I prefer the original treatment of the trailing leg to LJ's reduced-size version).

In the end, you probably won't be able to overcome this pelvic disjointedness facade. And if you labor over the detailing of such a small canvas space you risk having a relatively-trivial part of the piece start overwhelming the whole. The discrepancy as it stands isn't that bad, so I imagine one could live with it fine.

Anyway, I hope that helped.

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Since City of Heroes launched:
<ul type="square">[*] More than 32 million characters created – that’s 4 times the population of New York City![*] Players have spent a combined 292 centuries playing City of Heroes and City of Villains[/list]

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Well that's a bit misleading. That's 32 million characters over 12 parallel instances of New York City, (assuming we're not counting the European New York Cities, (Old York Cities?) or the test servers). Roughly that's 1/3rd the population capacity. On the other hand the same population sure fills up 12 parallel Rhode Islands quick.

The 292 centuries number really comes down to on the order of 24 centuries of parallelism.

Very impressive still. Yay us!

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I don't know if it's just me, but he seems stout, I don't know why.


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In general the stoutness illusion is formed from the torso having a longer-measured width (including armwidths) than height (from waist to shoulder). In this case, given the feature highlight of the massive biceps and upper arms, the width of the illusion is measured across the upper arms and sternum.

Toothpick-skinny legs could undermine that illusion, but in this case that's not a concern. However this tends to be a problem in getting Timm-style brutes looking right. (A Timm-style Bane can be quite tricky.)

In any case, this piece is looking great. I might humbly suggest there's room for some improvement on facial feature spacing. (Eyes in particular are usually not so crowded together.) Keep up the good work!

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It's based off of a design seen on this page.

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Everything on that page? WANT!!!!

If I stay out of Evil Malibu will I be safe from Barbie and Skipper?

Whenever I play my scrapper I hit that key, but then it nEVER DOES WHAT I THINK IT DOES.

Hmm... I'm not so sure that that's exactly a Timm style. Usually Timms don't feature such burly forearms and feet. Check out this Superman for example.

The closest I think I can get to Black's Knight is this Bane example. But in that case the upper arm thickness is so exaggerated as to almost surpass the main torso.

But in any case, whether or not the piece has Timm purity or not is kinda irrelevant. What matters is that it is awesome the way it is. Good job Kilo.

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My rescue mission went flawlessly. I prevailed where you all gave up.

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Flawlessly? Real companion cubes don't have corners. That's how you know you can interact with them. It seems you've been suckered with some cheap Carnie fakes there.

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This is the first full TEST version of the Justice League of America. The image is just a test lineup for analysis and comparison... but it was still fun and I wanted to show what I've been working on.


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Looks great! There's a nice Alex Ross feel in the Batman especially. I've always been a fan of Black Lightning too and I'm glad you didn't underappreciate him by leaving him out for a more legendary character (although I want to see Flash and Aquaman and others too .

I'd think there are still a number of things you can work on though. I think the biggest thing I see is that you would do well to develop a broader variety in muscular builds between characters, (there's a lot of sameness there in your current test lineup, especially the unusually extreme muscle size on the lower male thighs just above the knee). I imagine poser makes such an effort quite a pain, and regretfully I don't have a good suggestion to address that.

Other than that, there are minor, arguable things like some of the angles in Green Lantern's costume are a bit too flat. And Wonder Woman's hair is a bit bushy, possibly not styled well. Red Arrow's hair seems a bit misstyled as well.

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Thanks for looking.


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Uh...

I mean...

You're art is awesome. I'm just a silly guy who likes looking at awesome art. I'm far more in debt thankwise to you for your freely-offered awesomeness than you are to me.

But, yeah, thanks for being humble too.

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Comics:

Larissa's Day Off


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"&lt;---- Cons Grey" Lol!

As I vaguely recall, in the early days of the Arachnos Flier, it would generally spawn far out of place below the Grandville map due to a bug, which was very annoying for all the badge hunters because it was almost always unfindable. When under the map, the Flier would aggro on people walking through the tunnels. It couldn't shoot them, but it could spawn cruise missles in the tunnels.

Generally, if you see a cruise missle in the tunnels, it generally suggests that the Arachnos Flier spawn bug occurred, and you should probably /bug it. (And probably ask that this thread be moved to a different forum.)

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I finished my drawing of Rad Rhino. Please critique, I'm new at this stuff so I could use pointers on what to make better next time.


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Off the top of my head:

The prominent (left) bicep is a bit larger than what might seem proportional to the rest of the body. You might want to strike a flex pose in the mirror and observe how the bicep might taper off a bit more towards the crook of the elbow. On the other hand, a larger bicep isn't totally out of place for slightly pudgier musclemen.

The head size seems a bit small as well, usually the male head size is commonly relatable to the size of the pec, and the face size is usually relatable to the size of the hand. Unless you're going for some sort of disproportionate model like the Huge model.

Using a uniformly thin ink line (for example for the pec muscle contours) tends to undermine realism. It's more of an amateur stylism, especially when it's not really trying to mesh with a strong color palette. You can probably get away with either replacing the ink lines with observant color shading and color texturing, or practicing varying your inking technique (fat lines vs. thin lines vs. feathering vs. etching or hatching etc.). This kind of skill comes in real handy with abdominals especially.

Unfortunately I don't have a reference link to offer, but hopefully there are some decent inking technique tutorials easily googlable.

I like the effect of your use of the blue-to-green blending on the shoulder horns. And the way you implemented the visual effect of the rad powers on the hands translates well. I also like how you're trying to portray some emotional action into the face. If you could make the general pose a little more complimentary to that emotion and not as stiff you'd probably go a long way towards a more complete piece.

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If you move around they will charge towards you and then fight the repel once they're back inside the field. You can see that happening over and over again in Chaos Control video.


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That video is actually quite interesting, and although you're using it more to prove a narrow point about mob behavior vs. repel effects, it possibly can be used as a great demo of generalized FF quality. It certainly demonstrates the nature of FF's repel and knockback qualities in gameplay.

Unfortunately there seems to me to be two flaws that undercut the video's ability to demonstrate for the general argument: 1) without medicine's heal self power, the ff'er in the demo would have died quickly before 99% of the knockback quality could have been demonstrated, and 2) if any of the nemesis lts had been actively being killed, and vengeance went off, the ff'er would have died quickly again, so at most to pull off the results shown in the demo, any team supported by such an ff'er must remain pacifistic at all times which is incompatible with general CoH encounters.

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<ul type="square">[*]FF's strong ability to keep a team healthy highlights the poor design of Vigilence.[/list]

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I would argue that Vigilance isn't poorly designed. Players simply don't want to play it to its design (which is not necessarily unfair). The 'flaw' is only, arguably, that the psychological satisfaction of having a full green bar at all times is too much to overcome any impulse to be a teammate to a defender insofar as juggling less-than-full health values. Vigilance is actually a complete design, and somewhat interesting. It's just being ignored by non-defender players who have no real vested interest in it, and thus defenders are forced to ignore it as well.

One way to fix Vigilance is after all to change the game so that a full green bar all the time is much less common, much less an entitlement, and is much less a big deal to players. Vigilance isn't really broken, it just doesn't fit us. *shrug*



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<ul type="square">[*] The common FF playstyle of shielding the team and then using your other powers means you spend the majority of your time using the flawed secondary.[/list]

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The nature of having a 'fire and forget' primary that leaves you a lot of time to play with your secondary likely shouldn't be thought of as anything other than a variant of powerset interaction design. It's not good or bad, it's just a different choice, and the FF implementation and the general secondary implementations available have proven to be far from ineffective with this variant in play.

And I've got to say, my extensive experience with the psi secondary really leverages strengths out of the FF 'fire and forget' style. I get lots of time to sleep and stun and kb and -recharge and blast all over the place. I've found it very satisfactory myself.

The only time I'm disappointed with being an FF is when I get into groups who're prejudiced, ignorant, unforgiving, and intransigent about letting me play with all my powers. This is really very common, and includes a lot of people who are great, fun, mild people who are also great and fun teammates. But they turn in a hurry if I pull out my Repulsion Bomb straw to stir their drinks. For the most part, it's not worth it to tackle the problem of getting them past those hangups when I can have a lot of fun with these people so easily just by being more power-demure and supporting what they want to do with their powersets. Tragically, being the badge hunter that I am, this approach to interacting with the community has led me to regrettably give up on trying to get many badges until someone feels like opening up a pity slot for me on a 'good' (ie, can survive or even dominate without FF) team.

In so many ways I can earn my place on a team, but commonly I have to wait until someone feels like giving me a silver platter of team benefits before I get a chance. FF isn't bad, it's just that teammates design their styles to be effective without FF and thus the players have made FF expendable. FF doesn't need to be changed, if only teammate mindsets were changed instead.

...you're really not that far off of something amazing.