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Bambs79 — Amazon Avatars Commission
Published: 2009-06-18 09:53:38 +0000 UTC; Views: 25197; Favourites: 231; Downloads: 0
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Description
Here's the final rendered image. After I'd done all the stuff that was mentioned in the prelim deviation, it all got coloured in photoshop. I'm really pleased with how it turned out, although being your typical artist, if things aren't going how I planned about half way through, I get really stressed out and frustrated with myself, which happened here. Does anybody else get this? Or are all the other artists out there sensible enough to at least get to the end before getting wound up? Anyway, this all turned out for the best and it's now one of my favourite pieces!Please checkout ETJ's page [link] for more info on him, Amazon Avatars and his other roleplay arcs such as Escalation. His gallery of favourites is pretty cool too, including his character Olga Svenson, giantess!
*UPDATE* - 22.06.09
Lots of folk have been very kind and complimentary towards this piece so I suppose I should include this info just so people know how much reference goes into a pic. Lots of great comic artists can draw anatomy correctly through practice & memory but you can never have too much reference! For each of the girls I used pics of: Top left: Pamela Anderson (hair & bust) Marla Duncan, waist & glutes, my girlfriend posed for the foreshortened arm and the 'come hither' hand! Top right: Debbie Auer, body. Again, my better half patiently posed for photos so that I could get the arms, shoulders and especially the hands right. Bottom Left: Lenda Murray, shoulders & back. My girlfriend for the hand holding the shield (she's gonna start charging me for this I'm sure!) Bottom right: Federica Ortu for the body AND the bow. Got very lucky with finding this photo as there can't be many pics of lightweight FBBs holding bows! The face was based on April Arikssen.
For the background I had to find pics of doves, stags, hounds, owls, olive trees, moons and even an old time hearth! I'd be screwed without the internet!
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Comments: 31
Yesterday, I saw this pic and immediately fired up CoH to try the arc out. Sadly got screwed in the third mission when I suddenly fell through the map and got stuck below it so I had to quit. Next day, however, saw me right back at it and I managed to complete it, comfirming my suspicions that it was an arc jam-packed with ass-kicking adventure action. I gave it as much praise as I could, and all in all I owe it all to this pic
*totally forgot where he was going with this* Um... I think I'll post a comment with useful critique tomorrow, it's late right now
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Thanks man, that's very much appreciated and great to hear! I'm sure Shagster (creator of Amazon Avatars) would love to hear that too, as he's really keen to promote his arcs. Glad you completed it and found that it lived up to your expectations!
Thanks again dude, greatly appreciated!
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The final product is astounding!
And thanks for telling how you did manage to achieve it. 
(Thank your girlfriend for me for contributing to such artwork 
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Thanks man, very kind of you to say so. Yeah, I'm glad it turned out well in the end 'cos I was getting kinda disheartened half way through, it just wasn't had what I had in my head. However, fortunately managed to get it back on track and now I'm pretty pleased with it.
Will pass your compliment to my better half!
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The colours look great, everything came together nicely. To answer your question, I get fustrated sometimes while working on something. Most times I do finish what I started, but the finish product might be done days, weeks, or months later.
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Cheers, glad you like the colours, I wanted it to look nice and bright and eye-catching. Yeah, I know it's silly but if something doesn't seem to be going right (even though it's far from completion) I start wondering if I'm doing it right, or if there's a better technique! Also, when you're doing this for a living, the time factor is always lurking over your shoulder too!
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Axe Grrrrrl...... 👍: 0 ⏩: 1
He he he, glad you like. I wanted to draw her from the back as I thought it would be a good opportunity to test my anatomy skills and the back can be pretty tricky. The toughest bit was her right hand, holding the shield. I had to get my better half to hold a broom handle so that I could get the perspective and foreshortening right!
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Great pic, as always. As for getting frustrated and giving up on a piece, I'm not an artist, but my hard drive is littered with more fragments of stories than finished ones. I expect it's a human thing.
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Thanks dude, much appreciated. I've still got stuff I'd like to finish too. The Little Red Riding Hood pic in my gallery still needs colouring! I'd also like to get around to inking the Olga vs Cloverfield pic too!
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Cool, I'd love to see the colored versions of Little Red Riding Hood and Olga Vs. the Cloverfield critter. Not that I'd know what the Cloverfield critter looks like since I was so busy trying not to throw up and dealing with a splitting headache too. My ancient biologically grown retinas can't deal with all that POV movement. Cute idea, but not for me.
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Thanks dude, as always, much appreciated!
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*Sigh* If only they looked HALF this good in the game!!!
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He he, I see what you're saying 
Thanks so much for the compliment dude, it's very much appreciated and I'm really stoked that you like the pic, cheers!
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Thanks for all the hard work on this one Rob.
Now, we'll see if it draws the eyeballs of the fanbase on the CoH forums.....
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Sorry about the late reply Eric, you're totally welcome, the hard work is fully worth it and I really enjoy putting your ideas onto paper. Hopefully, it'll be successful on your CoH forum, you'll have to let me know, I was dead chuffed to hear that the Escalation one was well received and that your game plays went up.
Thanks again for the commish!
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Well, it looks like my timing wasn't quite as good with the Amazon-Avatar poster on the forums as it was with the Escalation poster was. Hasn't gotten quite as many forum views.
Still, the forum topic has gone from around 315 pageviews to over 850 pageviews as of tonight. And the Amazon-Avatars arc has gone from 89 ratings to 107. So, that's 18 more entertained players! And interestingly, Amazon-Avatars is currently at a 5 star rating (means average player rating is 4.5 or higher and rounding up). Escalation has more ratings, but seems stuck at 4 stars. Of course, pretty soon, some griefers will come along, see Amazon-Avatars at 5 stars, and hit it with 1-star ratings to drag it down...
So far, looks like moderately successful advertising effort. Not as great as Escalation's success, but so far, so good.
Thanks again, Rob!
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I dunno, sounds pretty good to me, 315 up to 850. Good to hear that it's getting good ratings too, don't worry about the griefers, anybody who gives it a poor rating just for the sake of doing so really can't have much going on in their life if that's how they get their kicks. There's obviously a lot of people who do like it enough for it to get an average of 4.5 or higher, which in my opinion means that you must be able to write a good arc! So that's pretty sweet.
How's Escalation going by the way? Is it still getting more plays?
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oh, yeah, 315 to 850 pageviews isn't bad. Just Escalation did better. It started lower on pageviews and hit about 1000 in similar time, and didn't slow down until 1200 pageviews.
actually, wow. Right now, Amazon-Avatars is at the top of search page for 5 stars. It's the only "5 star" arc with over 30 plays, it's the highest on the list for not being a "Dev's Choice". Wow. On the one hand, glad to see people will be seeing it, on the other hand big bullseye target.
Yeah, I don't let the griefers get to me. It's a pity they muck up the system, though.
Escalation it doing okay. Hovering at 140 ratings. I'll be doing some touch-ups and tweaks once Issue 15 goes live.
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Nice, sounds like Escalation's doing pretty good. 140 ratings sounds pretty good to me too.
Am I right in thinking that the griefers will have to at least play the arc in order to leave a comment? Also, are the griefers any kind of authority on roleplay gaming, do their ratings & comments actually have any credence?
You'll also have to educate me on the following, I figure the more I understand the better I might be able to solve a job for you in the future:
Do people have to pay or subscribe to play your arc?
What's a 'Dev's Choice'?
What are 'issues' in the gaming world, i.e what is Issue 15?
How long does an average arc take to complete, is it a couple of hours, an afternoon, a day, week?
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>Am I right in thinking that the griefers will have to at least play the arc in
>order to leave a comment? Also, are the griefers any kind of authority on
> roleplay gaming, do their ratings & comments actually have any credence?
Sorry, I used a gaming slang term without explaining it.
There were some psychological / sociological studies of massive multiplayer games, showed there were 4 archetypes of how people played the games and enjoyed them: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Griefers.
Griefers like to feel powerful by messing with someone else's gaming experience. It isn't always bad to have Griefers in the game, for example, they can be lively and dedicated players in PvP (player vs. player) sections of the game.
Sadly, there are some people who see a 5-star arc and say to themselves "he must've put a lot of work into that. bet it will really ruin his day to lower the rating." or they want to knock down other arcs in the rating so theirs will move up relatively. Or someone cynically thinks, "It can't be that good. I bet he got that 5 star rating by having his friends all vote it up. I'll knock it down a peg"
And no, Griefers who 1-star an arc "for fun" have no credence, but their votes have the same weight as everyone else. Everyone who is a paying customer has the right to vote.
There are some basic flaws in the rating system as it stands right now. To be honest, it's way to vulnerable to voting cabals, malicious voting, and other exploits. But, I'm working with what's there.
You probably don't need to know too much more about the system. Don't worry, it's all about making a pretty poster to get the intitial attention, the rest is up to me.
But, to answer your questions:
-any paying City of Heroes customer can play and rate any arc. No, they don't have to play it all the way through to rate it. That doesn't seem fair at first, but imagine you start a story and find right away it's filled with nonsenscical text and offensive slurs. You shouldn't have to play all the way through to express the opinion it's junk. Or an author could make the story so hard to complete that most people would give up before the end. If a story is so bad or so difficult that it makes the player quit, they should express an opinion.
-Dev's Choice is short for "Developer's Choice". If the people who run City of Heroes really like your arc, they can mark it one of their favorites, and it moves up to the top of the list for greater exposure. Basically, special award for writing something liked by the creators of the game.
-Issues are what City of Heroes calls their major updates to the game. Every 3 to 6 months, they do a major add-on to the game, adding new content, new game mechanics, bugfixes and program improvements. Being based on comic books, City of Heroes calls their "Updates" by the term "Issues". The next Issue will have some new tools in the Mission Architect I'll want to fiddle with to slightly improve both the stories.
-Player written arcs can be 1 to 5 missions long. I can usually breeze through my two mission arcs in about an hour for each of them, but I know them well. For someone slowing down to read all the text, say anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours, depending on skill of player, whether they read the side text, etc.
Hope that answers some questions.
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men you always give us greats works you inking digitally and if is yes what point use y your pencil 1 or 3
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Cheers Luis, much appreciated. I sketch using an F or H pencil onto A3 paper. I ink over the sketch using the brush tip of a black magic marker for the thick outlines and then use different fine-liner pens for all the smaller details. I rub out all the pencil marks and scan the inks into photoshop in grayscale. In photoshop I then use the brightness & contrast tool or the levels tool to make the blacks really dark. I then use the magic wand tool to cut out EVERY last piece of white on the page so that I'm left with a strong black outline. I make sure that this is the top layer and all the colours go beneath this. At present, I don't use the pencil tool that much in photoshop, I generally use the lasso tool.
Hope that helps!
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thanks a lot with your tips is a hard work but the results warrant it
ido that before draw all in pencil hb and the lines i do with blue pencil or other color usually scaned in color and inkin in the photoshop with pen tool and lasso tool i dont use alot but im try to used
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