Monthly Archives: February 2014

The Jackrabbit March Hare Contest

(Note: This is a guest post by author Ian Thomas Healy.)

Greetings, HeroMachine Faithful! I'm back once again with a brand new design contest in honor of my upcoming book release. Jackrabbit is the fifth book in the Just Cause Universe series and the fourth with a cover done by your very own Jeff Hebert! This is Jackrabbit:

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Jackrabbit is a fun guy, a weirdness magnet, and a penchant for getting himself into bizarre predicaments and ridiculous situations, and that's the theme of the contest. Since Jackrabbit himself has a very basic and simple appearance, I want to see you put him into bizarre predicaments and ridiculous situations (Keep them PG, please). Here are a couple ideas to get you started.

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As with all other HeroMachine contests, please upload your images to your favorite image sharing site and post the direct link to it here. The contest will end on Friday March 7. The prizes are as follows: I will select the best of the goofy Jackrabbit images and incorporate them into the video book trailer. If your work is selected for the trailer, you will win an ebook copy of Jackrabbit before it goes on sale on April 1, and your name will appear in the trailer credits. The creator of my favorite entry will win a signed Advance Reading Copy (a print book) as well as the ebook and trailer credit.

Let the wackiness commence!

Legal: Jackrabbit, Just Cause, and the Just Cause Universe are Copyright to Ian Thomas Healy. All Rights Reserved. Entry into this contest construes explicit permission for Ian Thomas Healy and Local Hero Press to utilize and display the contest entry for promotional purposes without further recompense to the entrant beyond the stated prizes of an ebook edition of Jackrabbit and/or a print edition of an Advance Reading Copy of Jackrabbit.

Half-Elven Victorian Detective

Another Reddit /r/characterdrawing sketch. The original description was:

She's a major character in a book that I'm currently writing, sort of the enigmatic Sherlock Holmes/Special Agent Pendergast type character that trouble always seems to follow or she always stirs up somehow. Just as a costume note she wears pants rather than a dress for practical purposes.

Go nuts.

victorian-detective

Enjoy!

Sophomoric Humor

Over on /r/characterdrawing, someone made the following request:

Hello everyone. This is my first post here, but somehow my players have themselves convinced that there's a dwarven soccer team involved in my current campaign. It might be some cryptic clues I've given them, but is there anyone out there who might be willing to sketch a dwarf playing soccer that I might use as the logo for the campaign online?

Thanks very much for your time.

So I came up with this. Yes, it's immature, but then again, so am I. Apologies to anyone finding it offensive.

dwarf-soccer

Smiles, everyone!

I've just added the following 19 smile variations to the MouthFemaleStandard set of items. I hope they put a smile on YOUR face as well! See what I did there?!

smiles

HM3: Bison Head Dreams!

Legatus requested a bison head as his prize for winning Character Design Contest #58 (Brute). This majestic head can be found in Head/Animals. Hot magenta fur not included!

 

BisonHead

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Just point and click to make amazing looking characters, like these:

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Have you ever wished you could see the character you've imagined drawn out in perfect detail by a professional artist, but you just don't have the skill to do it yourself?

Thanks to HeroMachine, now if you can imagine it, you can create it, absolutely free. With thousands of hand-drawn custom-colorable line art, you can outfit any character from any genre. Whether you're an RPGer who wants to bring a character sketch to the game, a novelist who wants to capture that perfect face to refer to as you write, or a gamer who wants a more comics-style rendering of your warrior, ninja, wizard, or archer, HeroMachine can bring that illustration to life.

Just choose the type of item you want, click on it to add it to the canvas, and choose your colors. In minutes you can build your very own customized, beautiful character sketch.

FNF in Question

Hey Folks, It is two days away from the new deadline for FNF and I have exactly 5 entrants out of the 20 that I need to run this contest. Now I am will to give another deadline extension of up to two weeks if it is needed however I will only do so if I have 15 people who have not yet sent me in an entry, tell me in the comments below that they are working on it and need more time. If I get 15 commitments I will give this one last deadline extension, otherwise this contest is dead, and I will not attempt to run another FNF in the future.

Character Of The Week: Candruth- Summer Flight

I know I don't do Character Of The Week as a regular blog post anymore but I thought I might as well bring it back as a one off because I feel that this picture is in need of being singled out for sheer awesomeness.

Now, Cadruth has been doing a lot of truly amazing stuff recently (if you haven't checked out the forum thread Candruth's Characters :3 you've really been missing out), but I think this one takes the biscuit, if not the entire cookie jar. And if I had to single out one reason and one reason alone (which is quite hard actually), it would be the shading.  The use of colour here to accentuate and add depth is truly superb, especially on the wings and on the neck. And whilst we're on the neck, I have to applaud Candruth's posing here. It is fairly difficult to do a raised head in Heromachine, mostly because the join between the chin and the neck is quite hard to get right, but it is pulled of brilliantly here and the use of shading just add to this. I also have to make mention of the colour usage here. We'll start of with the colour usage in the shading, because I haven't gone on about the shading enough yet, but it's nice to see shadowing without using black (especially as someone who uses that technique exclusively) it adds much more vibrancy to the picture and allows the highlighting to make the subject shine. Then we have the contrast between foreground and background. Whilst I do think there could have been more done to the background (maybe loosing the outlines around and adding some shading to the clouds, as they look quite flat currently, also maybe a few more stars would make it more visually pleasing) but the overall sunrise/ sunset (I think it's more likely meant to be sunrise going by the colours) effect is very nice and it contrasts well against the main foreground colours, the light creamy gold of the wings against the slate grey is especially effective. Overall a very impressive composition.

Kaldath's Caption Challenge #22

Once again it is time for a new caption contest! This week I want you to come up with your best replacement dialog for the following image:

Shadowcat1

The usual rules apply, You are limited to Three (3) entries which are due by 12 noon Eastern Time on Monday March 3rd.  Of course I as always expect you to keep your entries no worse then PG-13 in nature and that you follow all the normal rules of the forum when writing your caption for the above image. That being said I wish you all Good luck!

Character Design Contest ♯62- Face Off

Ok guys, for this weeks challenge I want you to create the best headshot you can. It can be human or non-human, male or female, but I only want a headshot, so that is head, neck & shoulders, nothing else. You can dress the character up, give them headgear and stuff like that and you can give the picture a background, but the one thing I don't want is a mask. I want to be able to see the characters face. What I'm looking for here is good expression and how you put together the design on just one area of the character. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

As usual, no entry limit and the contest will close at midnight Saturday (blog time). The winner gets to claim a custom made item from dblade to be put into heromachine, so long as the item conforms to his prize rules, which you can find here: http://www.heromachine.com/forum/the-heromachine-art-gallery/dblades-whiz-bang-item-dispenser/. Please read the contest rules before entering, have fun and good luck.

Rules for posts, contests, and challenges that I am hosting: Original characters only, no copyrighted characters, no characters based on copyrighted characters, no characters based on RPG’s or other games. The characters must be your own design and not based on any character that might be copyrighted in any way. I have the right to delete any post that I believe crosses this line without warnings. Only post characters that you have either created for this contest specifically or you know for certain have never been entered to a contest before. If you aren’t certain, don’t enter it, because I’m not going to go back through all of the contests and check.