The very first Character Design Challenge/Contest was held on April 21, 2009, more than three years ago; it's a little stunning to me that it's been going on for three years. Wow. The theme on that initial foray was the randomly chosen word "Capstan", and the winner was the legendary Imp:
I bring it up now because after all this time, we are at the One Hundredth Edition of this bi-weekly exercise in creativity! That's right, 100 times I've thrown out an idea and you all have owned it, coming up with awesome image after awesome image.
I wanted to do something special to commemorate this centennial edition, so here goes:
I want to see your best HeroMachine work of all time.
Every person gets one, and only one, entry, with the exception that it cannot have won a challenge before (to keep it fair). You can have entered in a contest in the past, though, it just can't have been the overall winner.
I want this to be as much a gallery of your awesome work as it is a contest, a celebration, if you will, of your creativity and artistic vision. I am sure I will be blown away as always.
Next Monday I will put all submissions into a big huge poll that everyone can vote on. The following Monday, the top five vote-getters will each win a custom character sketch, drawn by me, of the winning character. That's five, five, FIVE winners, people!
The usual guidelines for submitting entries apply, of course:
- All entries must be in JPG or PNG form (BMPs are too big), posted to a publicly accessible website (like the HeroMachine forums, ImageShack, PhotoBucket, or whatever);
- Entries must be made as a comment or comments to this post, containing a link directly to the image and the character name;
- The image cannot have WON any previous HeroMachine challenge (previous entries are fine, just not winners, to keep it fair);
- Please name your files as [your name]-[character name].[file extension] before you upload it. So DiCicatriz, for instance, would save his "Bayou Belle" character image as DiCicatriz-BayouBelle.png.
- Please make the link go directly to the image (like this) and not to a hosting jump page (like this). See this post on how to get the direct link for most sites.
- All entries must be in by next Monday, when I'll create a poll showing them all. The Monday after that, the top five vote-getters will each win a custom character sketch of the winning character by me.
Good luck!
Edited to Add: The instructions are clearly not good, and that's my fault. A poor designer blames his audience instead of trying to fix the problem, and I don't want to be a poor designer. So, since this is a comics-inspired site, I put together a visual how-to instead of the long text. I hope this helps make the whole process easier.
