Author Archives: AFDStudios

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:

1982594_10152210585727348_74292935_o

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.

1969572_10152210585287348_1295225709_o

1982513_10152210585037348_2070876455_o

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

Try HeroMachine Free!

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

NEW! You can now purchase HeroMachine 2 Desktop Version that will work on your local computer without needing an Internet connection and with no ads at all!

Download HeroMachine 2, Just $9.95!

 

Use HeroMachine 2 Online for FREE (simplest to use)!

 

Use HeroMachine 3 Online for FREE (advanced)!

 

Get HeroMachine Premium (no ads, full-width) for $0.99 a month!

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.

Carlako, half-elf fighter

The description from the original Reddit request was:

One of the first characters for another of my sons.
Carlako is a female half-elf with blue eyes and red hair, garbed in elven chainmail armor. She wields a pair of longswords in battle, the first one burning with blue flames, the second one traced with blue lightning.
Thanks!

And here's what I came up with:

carlako

Blank Bodies for Hand-Drawn Illustrations

In the process of cleaning up some hard drive space, I came across some body outlines I drew back in 2006. I cleaned them up a bit and provide them here for downloading and printing. These are not part of HeroMachine 3, they're just for folks who want to hand-draw (or use the computer with something like Paint if you want) outfits but need a body to hang them on.

These are all transparent PNGs so if you do want to use them in a painting application, they're easy to isolate from the background.

A sewer-dwelling urban wizard/druid half-orc

As motivation to sketch more, I've been fulfilling requests from /r/characterdrawing. Here's the one I did today:

sewer-orc

The original description was:

Ozmuk Was a runt of an orc. Picked on by his brothers and sneered at by his elders, he would grow to despise them all. His only refuge was the old man in the Cabin. The Old man taught Ozmuk the art, and the dirty deeds he sought for payment were not too steep a price. Perhaps he even could grow to care for this Old Man. Then the Druid came and changed things forever. The old man burned. In order to survive, the young Ozmuk clung to the only one he knew - the killer. Soon after he was set free to return to his Tribe. They rejected him, of course. His pain grew too strong and he soon killed his brothers and parents. Ozmuk trusts few beings other than his rat, Dido. he spends most his time in the sewers of the cities so he can sneak into libraries to further his arcane knowledge. Recently he has been kidnapped and made a slave on a pirate ship. He is plotting, and he has already murdered 4 of the crew in their sleep.

Villains are fun to draw!

Character Ideas

Sometimes the wellspring of invention runs dry and you need some help coming up with a cool concept for a character to design. If that happens to you, or if you're just looking for a challenge, experience what it's like to take someone else's vision and bring it to life. Head on over to Reddit's "Character Drawing" subreddit and look for entries marked "[LFA]" (Looking For Art). People give descriptions of their characters and you can reply with your version.

If you do, please tell them you came from HeroMachine and give the link. Also, I'd love to hear about it as well.

Good luck and have fun creating!

Winners for Kaldath's Caption Contest #20

Kaldath's had some pressing real-life stuff come up at the last minute and so I'm pinch-hitting for him as a guest judge on his last caption contest. The entries were a real hoot, thanks to everyone who chimed in!

He asked you to come up with the best replacement dialogue for this panel, and to make it even tougher all entries had to be in rhyme (to honor the demon Etrigan, who only speaks thus).

etrigankissesbats

The entries were fantastic, as I said, but my favorite three were:

  • D: Ah. Now we’re alone, in a meadow redolent of heather. I do love it when you use Imperial Leather.
  • DiCicatriz: Only for this Batty man, doth rise the demon Etrigan.
  • Calvary_Red: I must confess, in Hell down under,
    I like to dress as your Boy Wonder.

And from that list, I declare the winner to be ... Calvary Red! Congratulations and many thanks to all who entered!