Category Archives: Challenge Favorites

We had a ton of great entries for Character Contest 65 - Gemini, so many thanks to everyone for their awesome submissions!

As usual, I've picked out some of the ones I considered the very best, or the funniest, or that simply have some feature that I thought exceptional enough to bring to your attention.

If yours isn't listed here, that doesn't mean it wasn't good, it just means that in the opinion of one Internet blowhard (i.e. me), it wasn't quite up to the level of some of the others for one reason or another.

And now, your Finalists!

Continue reading →

Thank you to everyone who participated in Character Contest 64, which asked you to come up with prospective new members for DC Comics' "Legion of Super Heroes" (or its alternate group, the"Legion of Substitute Heroes"). I had a lot of fun reading and viewing the submissions; the Legion was arguably my favorite comic growing up (along with Green Lantern and The Flash) and this was a welcome walk down memory lane.

I do unfortunately have to take a quick moment for some housekeeping duties: Alphaalpharomeo, Dan, directawesome, Jordan_Xord, Yurasagi, and MrMatt220 all posted links that went to jump pages rather than directly to the image itself. In the future that may disqualify your submissions, so please post better, direct links in the future. In PhotoBucket, there's a box over to the right that specifically says "Direct Link" -- that's the one you want. In Picasaweb, right-click on the image and use "Copy Image URL" from the flyout menu. Thanks -- it makes downloading these much easier and faster for me.

Now, with that out of the way, on to the many wonderful Finalists!

Continue reading →

Many thanks to everyone who submitted an entry for the Taurus contest. I appreciate both your creativity and your willingness to share it.

I've selected a few illustrations that for various reasons caught my eye. I wanted to start with an update of Mark's GI-Joe ripoff team, the "Zodiac Commandos" with their newest member and the latest group shot since they're sort of the inspiration for the whole Zodiac Contest campaign:

(Click to embiggen.)

Continue reading →

The votes are in, the polls are closed, and we have our winners for Character Contest 62! The new Male Fantasy Warrior Template will be by xXBladeXIIXxx, and the new Female Fantasy Warrior Template will be by Sean David Ross! Congratulations to both of them, and further to all of the Finalists. It was a close vote at the end.

I'll need to get the text save strings from both of those chaps; in the event I don't get them in the next two weeks, I'll have to switch to the second-place Finalist.

Full results and images after the jump.

Male Fantasy Warrior Template:

Female Fantasy Warrior Template:

The response to Character Contest 62, which challenged you to create a template available to everyone who uses HeroMachine 3 for a Fantasy Warrior, was huge. My sincere thanks to everyone who entered, I am once again humbled by your creativity and skill.

I've broken the results into two sections, male and female. I went through and picked out my favorites, limiting it to one entry per person in the interest of fairness even though there were some who had two or more I thought were outstanding. I ended up disqualifying any that had the arms in a non-standard position (that was one of the contest requirements this time around).

But hey, I've done the hard part, now you get to do the even harder part of picking a winner! After I show you all of the Finalists, I'll have a poll where you can vote for up to five (5) entries you think would be great templates to show to new users as a starting point. Polls close at 8 am Mountain Time on Wednesday when the entry with the highest total number of votes will win.

You can use whatever criteria you like for voting, of course, but as for me, here's how I looked at the initial entries:

1. Is it awesome to look at?
2. Is it relatively easy to duplicate or pick apart so the newbie can figure out how to do it on their own?
3. Does it say "Fantasy Warrior" to me when I look at it?

Without further fanfare, I present the many Finalists for the Female Fantasy Warrior template for the first half of Character Contest 62:

Continue reading →

The response to Character Contest 62, which challenged you to create a template available to everyone who uses HeroMachine 3 for a Fantasy Warrior, was huge. My sincere thanks to everyone who entered, I am once again humbled by your creativity and skill.

I've broken the results into two sections, male and female. I went through and picked out my favorites, limiting it to one entry per person in the interest of fairness even though there were some (Felipe S. Card, Scorpidius, Sutter Kaine, and several others) who had two or more I thought were outstanding. I ended up disqualifying any that had the arms in a non-standard position (that was one of the contest requirements this time around), and although I picked out several Templars initially (PyroDude760, Myro, and a few others), I ended up leaving them off at the end because they were all just too similar.

But hey, I've done the hard part, now you get to do the even harder part of picking a winner! After I show you all of the Finalists, I'll have a poll where you can vote for up to five (5) entries you think would be great templates to show to new users as a starting point. Polls close at 8 am Mountain Time on Wednesday when the entry with the highest total number of votes will win.

You can use whatever criteria you like for voting, of course, but as for me, here's how I looked at the initial entries:

1. Is it awesome to look at?
2. Is it relatively easy to duplicate or pick apart so the newbie can figure out how to do it on their own?
3. Does it say "Fantasy Warrior" to me when I look at it?

Without further fanfare, I present the many Finalists for the Male Fantasy Warrior template for the first half of Character Contest 62:

Continue reading →