Category Archives: Tips & Tricks

Advice and hints on how to create the perfect character illustration.

Laying it all out

Hammerknight put together a series of comic book templates you could use in a paint program like Photoshop or MS Paint or whatnot to assemble your own issue out of your HeroMachine characters. Thanks once again, big guy! After the jump you'll find layouts for the cover and multiple different pages. Just click on any one to get a full-size version which you can save to your local hard drive.

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The Little Things

Hammerknight's put together an outstanding set of tips for this week about how important the "little things" are to making a really top-notch illustration. He's absolutely dead-on about this, folks. The whole point of creating a "fantastic" illustration is to draw the viewer's belief in to the point where they are convinced that you are depicting something real. Anything that jerks the viewer out of that created reality shatters the illusion. It's one of the (many) things that drives me nuts about Liefeld's art, they go through all this trouble to create these pulse-pounding worlds and at every turn, there's something so jarringly wrong you can't help but be drawn up short.

Anyway, hope you enjoy these as much as I did, they're quite excellent. Thanks HK! As always, just click on any image to see it in a much larger and more legible size.

Recipe: Size still matters

I lied last week and said Hammerknight's recipes included resizing information for the female template's feet. Oops. Luckily he has made me an un-liar, with this week's installment! Many thanks to him as always for generously sharing his time and skill with the rest of us slackers. As usual, click on either image to enlarge for legibility.

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Thanks again, Hammerknight!

Gui-Tar-HE-ro

A couple of weeks ago Martian Blue posted a character holding a truly amazing hand-crafted electric guitar. He was kind enough to put together a guide on how to make your own guitar from bits and pieces in HM3, which I really appreciate. Hopefully it'll help others see how to make their own creations, as well. Thanks Martian Blue!

Handing it to you

Many thanks to Hammerknight for these two great guides on how to properly position and scale the existing hands and feet for the female template. Good stuff as always! I am definitely thankful for HK on this Thanksgiving, and for all of you who are willing to share your creativity, humor, and time to help make this such a fun and entertaining site.

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(Click on either image to see at full size. And I love the "Isia Approved" stamp!)

Recipe: Dress that gal up

Hammerknight is back with another installment of dressing your female character for success, considering the new body types and options now available. Many thanks to him as always! If you have a request for a guide, please let him know in the comments.

Thanks HK!

Making covers

Hammerknight has really outdone himself this week, putting together a wonderful guide on using third-party applications to assemble a comic book cover out of your HeroMachine parts. I can't even imagine how much effort went into putting this together, many thanks to him.

As usual, click on any of these images for a larger version.

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Multi Layer Masking

Many thanks to Hammerknight for putting together the following tutorials AND a fun Halloween card, too! As always, click on any of the images to see them full size, and please let HK know what you think in the comments.

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happy-haloween

At the boutique

Hammerknight was asked in the last recipe posting for help dressing up the admittedly very primitive and limited female figure, so he was nice enough to provide the following quick guide. Many thanks to him as always for the help! If there's anything in particular you want to see him put together be sure to let him know in the comments.

Thanks HK!

Halloween2: The Wizard of Hammer

Hammerknight has returned with another set of great Halloween-themed HeroMachine 3 costumery, this time reproducing the Wizard of Oz cast! It's more great work, complete with instructions for how you can do the same thing. Way to go, HK!

As usual, click on any of these to get a larger, more readable size. Here's the whole group:

the-wizard-of-oz

And now, the recipes for each individual:

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