goldbricker

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If I really want to be an artist they are probably right =)


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This seems self-contradictory to me.

There are artists out there working in some of the most disgusting media in the world. Stereotypically these people are not popular. Perhaps they are even bad human beings, but they do produce art.

In your case, your art features a touch of erotica. Not only is this still art, but stereotypically your popularity can only increase from it.

And on top of that you can still pull off a nicely stylized pic like Mr. Wrong. I mean... come on... you doubt yourself that much?

An artist drives herself. People telling you what to do can't make you an artist. You've got to want to make that statement on your own canvas. And from what I've seen of your work, you've been an artist for a long time. I want to see more.

The thumb on the far hand (his right hand) is on the wrong side of his hand, (unless somehow he's contorted his forearm a full 180 degrees around in a manner blocked from view by the torso, which is really really hard for a real person to do and isn't a very useful pose for setting up a fighting move).

The musculature on the torso (abs and pecs) are flowing in a very different direction from where the pelvis is oriented. It's almost like his torso was ripped off of the lower half of his body, rotated 90 degrees to face the camera, then reattached. Both halves look good, but they don't fit together.

I would suggest leaving the legs where they are, and redoing the pecs and abs musculature. I would probably try to change the pecs slightly so that the one on the right (his left pec) was depicted as the larger one, and then I'd draw the midsection line that falls vertically down the middle of the pecs and abs, to curve gracefully towards the middle of the pelvis, which with the given legs pose happens to be on the left boundary of the torso as drawn.

Once I have that line drawn, I'd fill in his left abs along the right side of that line, and fill in only the higher abs on the other side of that line, because they're twisting away from the camera and the lower ones are getting blocked from view.

The biggest trick in all of this is getting the right 'graceful line of the middle of pecs and abs' drawn for such a twisting pose. Takes some patience and practice to get the right kind of instinct for it. It can help a lot to just take 10 minutes and try to do that pose in the mirror and see what your own torso is doing to perform that twist.

Anyway, hope that helps.

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I see ultra-realistic and others that are more cartoony.
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How do you find the style that works best for you?


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I'd suggest you simply trust in two innate skills: the coordination in your arm (shoulder-elbow-wrist-fingers-drawingtool), and the coordination in your mind (desire-imagination-perception-learning). Your style will generally come from a combination of what you want to think about and what kind of strength and precision your arm has to work with.

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I've been struggling with my art because I maybe I try to hard for realism and it comes out cartoony


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This sounds like: you want to draw realism, but can't quite keep the visual in your mind while you're pushing your arm around.

I find that it's common to focus on the target in mind up until the last second before the arm starts to draw the first line, and then the target blanks out of the mind while watching the line being drawn. You end up focusing on the line, how thick it is, how the curve is coming out, all the imperfections of the surface, how it cuts through the whitespace. The goal is completely out of mind over those few seconds.

It's coming out cartoony because you're effectively focusing only on the lines being drawn, and you're good at visualizing a couple of lines on a page into a cartoon. (This is actually a good thing, but it does severely undermine attempts at realism.)

How do you turn this around? Well, it requires a lot of willpower initially, and a lot of motivation to practice. You kind of have to reject the natural tendency to focus on the line being drawn, and continually reimpose the image of what you're aiming to draw in your mind.

Working on strengthening your arm is good too, because lessening any flaws it brings to the table will also lessen mental distractions.

Unfortunately, this kind of process is slow and frustrating because it's really hard to go against one's natural mentality. But if you want to draw any particular style, you have to be able to get those images into your head and to lock them in while you draw.

LOL! "Valkvoline"

Video diary of NCSoft at a con in Bristol

Crosspost from the comic book/culture forum.

Some interesting sketching going on in the middle. And it's nice to be able to put a face to a redname (Bridger).

Good work. You could probably turn that style into a regular webcomic if you wanted.

Very nice Juggy. Any chance you could fill in the backgrounds with some hints of battlescapes from the various eras?

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KR Background
CF Background


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Keep in mind, the war walls are going away soon, these backgrounds will become out of date soon enough.

Yes, I like that piece a lot. You have been getting better and better.

The only thing that bugs me with that piece is that the count of separate colors is so high for such a small space. Greens, blues, violets, reds, yellows, oranges, whites, blacks. It's kind of a clash to take them all in at once, and it's hard to figure out which part to focus on. Ironically, being hard to focus on is sort of the nature of the shade so it kinda works on that level.

Wait.... Kilo's both a hero and a villain? Mind explaining that a bit more?

Congrats on your first acquisition in a new collection

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What actor/actress would you want to see portray your toon?

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Depends... If they're just going to set up the source material for standard movie industry, lowest common denominator, 'Have Superman fight polar bears and his costume is a fake symbiote he keeps in a bottle in his closet', treatment, then I'd prefer an actor who can shine above that kind of tripe, like Bruce Campbell. Simon Pegg can probably pull that off too.

In the off chance they actually really materialize the core of the source material, then I'd want to go for someone with heavy chops, like Ryan Gosling or Edward Norton. Although I doubt my toon'd get any screen time for them to work with.

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Same picture but with a slightly different background

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The background is really hard to see. Can you pump it up a bit? The characer is getting lost in the black... which is kind of appropriate for his design, but it undercuts the impact of the piece.

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I might suggest the real struggle in this piece is the ambitious layout of the background black and white versus the foreground black. Black shapes on black backgrounds generally require abandoning traditional techniques for more specialized tricks, but in this case, the positioning of the spotlight puts half of the foreground shape against a white background.

What I would *want* to suggest is to try to think of the 3d model as two separate halves.

The top half you should be trying to deemphasize any spotlight reflections and on the model surface except in thin lines on the very contours of the shapes, (and only as much as is required to get a vague feel for the full shape). Areas of full color such as the red triangle on the chest, the white eyes, and the red stripe on the head should be made as uniform as possible (take a look at some of the art in Texas Titan's thread for example). That distracting white reflection right at the tip of the red stripe has got to go.

The bottom half, with the spotlight behind it, should be treated to the complimentary approach: deemphasize contour highlights and emphasize bulk and texture highlights, especially where interesting surface texture details can be efficiently focused.

Now, I must admit, it's a lot easier to casually throw out these kinds of suggestions than it is to actually get them to work in a 3d modeller or graphics editor. There's a lot of fatiguing custom detail work that would be required to follow up.

But, after all that, the real big problem with making this kind of double approach is how to handle the highlighting where the two halves come together. It's really hard to shift between the two approaches in such a small space without risking ruining the natural look of the piece.

As for trying to add a spiderweb in the background, since the background is so dark, such an element is only beneficial if it can contribute towards defining the black-on-black main subject more. It seems to me it's best implemented with a web pattern of proportionate size to the model's size, (in this case the web pattern is a little too thin and packed together), with coloring that's slighly lighter on the web strands very close to the model's contours. Most of the pattern covering empty space can be left to blend in with the darkness.

Again, that's probably advice that's easier to give than to follup up on. I don't mean to suggest that the piece sucks in any way as is. It's actually quite good, just challenged by a tough spotlight. If the spotlight were moved to the corner away from the character, or moved to highlight the entire background of the character, you'd probably have a much more comfortable result.

I figured I'd expand a bit on my poll choices, in case the devs might be willing to ponder observations from the coh perspective in which I find myself these days:

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What was your favorite 'feature' of Issue 9?
<ul type="square"> [*] Invention System[*] Consignment Markets[*] Statesman's Task Force[*] New Hamidon Encounter[*] Not listed I will leave a post![/list]

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I picked the STF. Leading up to I9 I was all into the idea of IO recipes and I was really impressed with a lot of the structure of the consignment houses and I was always a fan of Hami and eager to see him updated. Then I9 hit and after trying to interact with all three I kept hitting flaw after flaw and all three systems bogged down on me. Item market values are too high for my budget, but there are too many valueless drops I'm getting and it's far too much work to juggle my salvage and recipes that can't stop hitting storage limits. The Hami raids I've tried have been ridiculous, with zone population cap problems (both griefing and how hami's cheap 'evolution' in power is too much to expect only 50 people to tackle).

On the other hand, I tried the STF twice and beat it twice. Unlike Hami, you can compensate for suboptimal group configurations and making mistakes by just working at it together. You can pick up a diverse team that doesn't necessarily have some of the power builds, (one of my attempts was without a tank, and the other was without any rads), and you still have a reasonable shot at winning. Having a hospital right in the last mission was a great idea. It's kind of a fun story too. It's far and away the highest quality implementation of any of the I9 features.

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What new shiney were you most excited to get?
<ul type="square">[*] New Badges[*] New Costumes[*] New IO Sets[*] Salvage and Recipes[*] Personal Storage[/list]

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I've been a badger for a long time now (in the 380s leading up to I9), but the new market badges have proven to be so not worth all the costs with all the flaws in the market, recipe, and salvage systems. I might get around to them eventually assuming the market stabilizes but it's not all that clear that the players won't trend towards giving up on the marketplace and just selling items to stores, which would entirely crash the market.

The IO sets had a good shot to be the best in this category, but although it's relatively easy to find enough information and tools on the web to plan out a promising IO build for a character, it's ludicrously hard to get enough IO pieces for any such build and it's almost impossible to gracefully transition an existing character (especially one that has many hamios slotted) into an IO build.

'Personal Storage'? Why is that an option here? There's nothing worthwhile to personally store other that what's already a part of the recipe system, and it's already flawed by how low the storage limit is vs. how quickly one builds up salvage with no market value that nonetheless are parts of recipes one might want to create if only the rare salvage for them wasn't going for 100x one's salvage budget on the market.

No, the only choice in this question that hits any real expectations are the costume pieces. Despite the low drop rates, they are trickling into people, and despite how overexpensive they are, they aren't complete budget killers.

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Do you like the addtion of a dynamic economic system?
<ul type="square">[*] I can't stop logging in to check my sales![*] Yes, I think it adds to the game.[*] No, I liked it better before.[*] Indifferent[*] Currently laying explosive charges under all markets.[/list]

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The true answer for me is that I respect the addition of a dynamic market system, despite not finding it much of an attraction in general. I do like many aspects of this market system, like the double blind auctions, the highest bid goes to the lowest price rule, the idea that you have to spend a market slot to either do a bid or a sale. What I don't like is how the playerbase is trending with these tools. Everything started out way overpriced because of the influence of rich veteran players, then everything not in demand tanked to nothing while everything in demand stayed far overpriced, and now supply appears to be starting to drop as people finish stocking their existing characters (whether from giving up or going broke), and also as people find selling items to stores much simpler to deal with, (at least while they wait for market values to stabilize). There's a real chance now that the market will never stabilize but instead get stuck on dysfunctionally chaotic waves of partial supply and limited interest.

In the end, the market is sort of cool, and undermined by some flaws, and the players are not trending well with it. So, overall I guess I'm left indifferent by the whole thing.

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Did you find the invention tutorial easy to use?
<ul type="square">[*] Yes, I graduated with honors.[*] No, I struggled to follow along.[*] Who reads the manual?[*] What Invention system?[/list]

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The invention tutorial is fairly straightfoward. Trying to wedge in all the university theming was kind of clunky, (although the actual content involved is by itself interesting), so I can see some people having a hard time getting past that. The CoH tutorial style has always been weird, the popup boxes they use always are so schismatic from the general nature of the game. There are a number of gui elements that CoH never did all that well, and those elements come into play a lot with the tutorial. But all in all, learning about inventions isn't all that hard whether you go through the tutorial or search on the web or just ask friends.

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How would you rate Issue 9 overall?
<ul type="square">[*] 5 stars and two thumbs up![*] 4 stars and a thumb.[*] 3 and a half stars.[*] 2 stars.[*] Eep it looks bleak.[/list]

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I9 packs in enough features for 5-star value, but so many of its design flaws have slapped me in the face that I regret I have to give it 2 stars. If I were to include the fact that a Cathedral of Pain fix failed to arrive before or with I9, I would've picked bleak instead.

Still, the core game remains fun. I just have more (and more fatiguing) overhead now to get through before I can tap into that core game.

Once that's gone, this forum will be all that's left for consistent game-based art content. But no pressure.

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The comic has had a great run. It has always served as an ambassador for the game; showing comic readers the potential that can be found in City of Heroes or City of Villains to set their imagination free! However, when we evaluate the production and distribution of the Comic, our current feeling is that the needed time and energy can be more wisely spent and net a more direct impact to the game.


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Yeah, I can see the reasoning of pulling the plug on an ambassador that costs too much to maintain.

However, I feel it's ultimately a bad choice in this situation. First I think that it is and always was a mistake to approach the comic book as an ambassador to the comic book cultural space from the mmorpg cultural space. Instead it should have been treated as more of a bridge between the two, and the game should have been directed to personify half of this bridge as well.

Ideally, the book should have directly reflected events in the game, and the game should have directly replicated objects in the book.

Yes this kind of synergy would have been a logic and implementation nightmare for the devs. But the payoff, a true, rich innovation on the culture of the superhero throughout today's society, and a potentially-trailblazing leadership in both cultures, would have been well worth the choice to at least preliminarily stand up to the horrors. Inwardly, I'm very disappointed that the devs are letting that potential die.

However, I can't really begrudge the devs. Just because the coh-game-book synergy wasn't handled trailblazingly doesn't mean the game isn't still fun, (although the excessive overhead of ios is straining things). It's just not as exceptionally special as it once was.

Perhaps the devs can compensate a bit for the loss of the comic book by hiring one or more comic book artist(s) on staff to produce comic-book-style art pieces of player characters upon player request? Perhaps restrict requests to those willing to spend some of their in-game, built up, free-tailor-session tokens for the service. Maybe that could help keep the game's foot in the comic culture's door.

It's out. I got it Monday. I didn't want to say anything because I am very jealous not only of the last page, but of a couple of panels featuring some other heroes I know.

Given all that though, I found myself really enjoying almost everything about the issue, even the weak plot.

Going waaay back to BAB's post.

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Hamidon and the mitos do damage through Phase Shift to prevent Phantom Army and Phase Shift type powers becoming "required" for a raid.


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I am totally on board with that motivation.

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Fictionally, Hamidon evolves. When he's continually defeated using a particular strategy or power he's naturally going to evolve a counter to it. This ability to attack phase-shifted targets is part of that evolution.


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This started out as fine logic, up until the point where phase shift is suddenly something it never was. In fictional terms, what you've done isn't an evolution of hami. It's a devolvution of phase shift. And that is a (not particularly egregious) mistake. That's the issue that the players are trying to get across.

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Why not simply change the AI so it ignores Phantom Army? Because we don't want it to ignore Phantom Army. Using Phantom Army as a diversion is a perfectly sound tactic. We just didn't want PA to be any better than other pets/minions for that purpose.


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I have no problem with that motivation. (Note: this tone of answer offers no recognition that the player is trying to offer one example as proof that there are ways to evolve hami for your purposes yet stay within the bounds of the established 'fiction' of phase shift.)

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We've gotten many PMs with similiar laments about defense, resistance, stealth, etc. All of which are reasonable complaints. However, it's simply not what this particular encounter is. As others have pointed out, in order to make a single entity that can be attacked by 50 players at the same time we have to step outside of the bounds of 'normal' rules in order to make it challenging.


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There is a difference between an encounter being a challenge, and an encounter being incredible. This change (at least lacking the significant fictional backup required to explain why/how a damage source in normal reality can affect a target phase shifted out of normal reality), this change has no credibility. This mechanic isn't a challenge in a hami raid, it's an artificial discontinuity in the same class as the invisible hami during a 200-man old school hold phase.

Anyone can slap a post-it note on any character with 'evolved' written on it. That doesn't make it credible or even aesthetically appealing. (That's part of the reason why many content creators are so aggressive with copyright and trademark.)

In this case (hami being cheap vs. phase shift), the credibility is not there, and thus we come back to the original question: What is the value of phase shift? What is phase shift?

It was (likely exactly) designed fictionally to be a perfect invulnerability at the cost of heavy end use plus near perfect isolation. Later there was added an artificial time limit (to limit hami exploits) and broadened isolation (to prevent glowie interaction that was previously allowed).

The perfect invulnerability should remain, because (outside of fiction) that's the whole point of the power and how it has been implemented in the powerset system.

That said, the question remains as to how Hami has to evolve to phase shift tactics that both makes sense fictionally and addresses the goal of being an effective but not overwhelming countertactic. How would one approach the problem if he were hami?

Ignoring phase shifters is an obvious approach. But ignoring a shifter's pets seems inconsistent with normal hami behavior. It seems a bit unfair that pets can still somehow maintain a link to a master under phase shift. Perhaps hami can evolve to feel out this link? Why not make a change so that any player that both has a self-only effect on them (like phase shift or rest or personal force field) and has a pet out, then any power or effect that lands on any such pet (even if the pet were invulnerable) is duplicated on the master, and in fact, any extra buffs or mitigation on the master are ignored by the duplicated effects.

Another thing Hami can evolve is the nature of his goo. He might not be able to affect players currently on an unreal plane, but he can evolve to warp the reality around him so that it's harder to maintain the shift. How about... if hami sees a phase shifter coming, he can shift the nature of his goo from a slow/interrupt aoe to a strong end penalty to all powers aoe.

In any case, the only advantage the approach of cheap-damage-through-phase-shift has over all of the previous suggestions is that it is inexpensive to develop and implement. And, actually, this is a just reason. It may lead to incredulity, which compounds on itself when reasoning of 'hami is evolving' is offered in its place, but if that's the basic truth of the business environment, I can deal with it.

Wow! That's excellent technique on the shading, and how you've kept the art style consistent between the main figure and the bird sculpture can be really hard to do.

I really love how you've pulled off the white highlights on the bird sculpture. There was almost no room for error for how tight that is and it looks perfect. In contrast the moon highlighting looks a bit fudged. (But only a bit. It's still solid execution. And given how it's not supposed to be a main subject of the piece, a bit of fuzzy technique on it also works to the piece's advantage.)

I once criticized your gallery for being way too repetetive... man did you ever break out of that mold with this piece.

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Would the subscribing consumer base prefer NCsoft/Cryptic to allocate resources to publications that are often outdated due to upgrades within a very short time period.


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This is in some ways a ridiculous question. There are many ways NCSoft/Cryptic can pull off effective game system documentation. Have you considered (un)officially partnering with paragonwiki for example? Yes there'd be a legal storm around that kind of initiative, but for reasons that are irrelevant to the core question of efficient documentation for players.

Basically, there are many options that have potential if the people have the power can just take the responsibility to creatively think of them, (and many players are trying to help out with that). Personally, I don't like this trend of implying that the players are significantly to blame for (or too stupid to grasp the nature of) the flaws they're only trying to highlight for potential improvement.

C'mon Ex Libris, you can do better.

(Yes, I admit, so could I)

I find your gallery kind of... meta-confusing I guess.

Your work makes for a cool first impression. Looking over more of the gallery though... there's a *lot* of repetition there. There seems to be just 3 poses: standing mannequin facing straight on, ballet stance 3/4-to-the-side chin down, and floating symmetric with legs fully extended and pointed. If there are wings the wings are almost always the same shape.

But then, there are a couple of pieces that are totally not in this pattern at all... 'Deal With The Dragon' and 'Crushed Tin'... They almost end up being the most interesting because they're so distinct from the rest.

Overall I'm getting myself confused trying to figure out how to enjoy your work. It's definitely cool, but almost stale. Maybe you could try challenging yourself with pulling in more dynamic elements into your poses and settings?

I think it's about time the title of this thread changed.

Keep it up Kilo.

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Part 3


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Yay! Someone did art of my toon! (Even though I can never get my brain to remember to set up reference screenies of him.)

So funny too. It's a great project all around.

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Your answers will most likely appear in some form in Friday's City of Nuts strip, or editorialized by me... so here we go -


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My main's not really interested in being recognized, not even in such a cool strip. Mostly he'd just try to get his stuff done and get out of the way so that the cool kids have all the space they need to do their thing. (Technically he's a 50 FF/Psi/Psi Magic Defender since you asked.)

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4) What's your favorite/least favorite mob to face...



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Setting aside unique AVs and GMs, I think my fav are carnies. Mostly they have a cartoonish creativity that's far more enjoyable than most groups. My least fav are malta auto turrets, (I like malta in general, even the saps are no problem, but those turrets hit every single weakness in my character.)

The one single thing I've grown to hate the most in CoX is that dumb 5-story boss room in the basic caves tileset. It takes so long to clear, and there are so many geometry wedges where mobs can remain completely unnoticed from players 5 ft away. And unlike many of the outright and inciteful bugs in the game, this room keeps punching me straight in the face over and over.

Oops, got a bit ranty there...

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Tarberetta

Not completely happy with it, but trying to fix it seems to make it worse :/


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One thing that *does* make me happy about the piece is how the extremely-foreshortened blade tip is rendered. It looks a little warped but I'd suggest you hit almost the exact right amount of warp to make the foreshortening look real. It's a really tiny range and you got it about head on.

Basically, in real life, human stereo perception simply cannot get a grasp of what a long thin blade's image as seen from the tip is supposed to be. That perception struggles with with double vision and struggles with deriving a focus distance that can stabilize the full object's image.

That's why a bit of unnatural warp in the drawing of an object subject to that extreme a foreshortening lends a realistic bent to the viewer. It's easy to go too far with warping the subject in the drawing which would ruin the effect. You basically want enough of a warp to be more than a hint of unnaturalness, but not so much that it's obvious you're trying to warp the image.

This might be where a significant chunk of your discomfort with the drawing is coming from. The blade doesn't look perfectly natural or perfectly consistent with the style of the rest of the piece, but I'd argue that that's just the paradox of extremely-foreshortened subjects: not even the real life version can be made to "look" natural, so making it look weird actually makes it look believable.

One other thing I'm inspired to mention is that when you have significantly-conspicuous elements in a piece that are supposed to be a great distance apart but yet crowd together in the same spot of the page, (such as the blade tip and tarb's right wing), it's worth considering giving the closer element some breathing room from the crowding of the far elements by maintaining a thin layer of null space around the countour of the near element. (This would be similar to the theory used for antialiasing fonts and other line-based images.)

In other words, you might consider erasing a tiny bit of the wing detail that's flush up against the blade tip lines. Almost treat it like the blade (as well as every object in the world) has a thin layer of vision-blurring aura emanating from it's surface, but that aura only becomes noticeable or effective when it's very close to the viewpoint.

Hope that helps.