So back over at 3ebb, I got in the habit of posting some of the art I’ve been doing for my group’s ongoing online Mutants & Masterminds game. I figured I might as well move at least some of the newer stuff I’ve posted over to here (because I heart Photoshop too darn much for my own good).
Below is Scion (the shapeshifter/matter-shaper pictured in the above post in her normal costume) in the midst of an unwanted and uncontrolled transformation into her much-despied “slut-suit” (which has come in-game to represent the darker side of the character). I also cranked it up a notch on the Primal Force effects (the prismatic energy behind Scion). I also tried to play around with perspective a bit and more dramatic posing. My real focus, though, was on getting a suitable look of despair on Scion’s face despite wearing a mask, and getting the transformation to look cool enough.
But I thought today I’d switch things up and post a few of the logos for different groups in our Worlds Within Worlds game.
The first is for a now-defunct organization called the Sovereign Earth Project, a group based on the main Earth (E-010), funded mostly by the British government. Their founder, Doctor Sydney Weaver, lost almost his entire family (including his son, his daughter-in-law, and his wife) when the planeswalker Nicholas Walker razed his town to the ground for some sinister end still not understood. Among the survivors was his granddaughter, Rachel Weaver, and he swore to find a way to protect people from extraplanar monsters like Walker. This was the birth of the Sovereign Earth Project. Initially acting as little more than a school for young psychics, it grew into a source of metahuman psychic soldiers for the British Army (as Weaver realized that metahumans were the best defense against extraplanar invasion). After a beloved student at the school was killed in battle, Doctor Weaver began to use cloning to ensure that he’d never lose a student again.
Things began to spiral out of control from there. A new recruit for the Project, a demented man named Doctor Robin Ni, began working to improve the clones beyond the original students’ abilities at the cost of their humanity, which made many of the other researchers uneasy. The Sovereign Earth Project became more proactive, actually attacking and trying to drive off or kill creatures of extraplanar origin (such as the heroes Mockingbird and Mockingbird, or the heroine Scion for fear of her turning out like her father, Walker). Eventually, a botched attempt to kidnap the heroes by the SEP and a betrayal by Doctor Ni undid the Project, with many of the clones being destroyed, and almost all of its researchers killed. The SEP is no more, but its ideals of defending the world from extraplanars are still popular in some circles.
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Meanwhile, a more heroic group founded in recent months is the Aegis Corps, an alliance of superheroes out of Paragon City, Rhode Island. Under the direction of Sentinel, it organizes different solo heroes and teams of heroes, coordinating them to handle different threats depending on each hero’s abilities and limits. There’s been some big PR problems for the Corps lately, with one of their most famous heroes being discredited with an attempted murder and then a rampage against the criminal element in Paragon, as well as rumors about illegal collusion between the Corps and the Police Department’s Psi Division (the head of the Psi Division has been dating a member of the Corps for a few weeks now).
The Corps uses Ancient Greek military terms to organize itself, with the weakest active heroes at hoplite-rank and the strongest at thessalian-rank (thanks to their leader Sentinel’s penchant for Greek history).
For now though, I’ll post a recently-finished picture of a character that our current GM refers to as, “Adorable. In a broken way.” Lyla is a girl in our Worlds Within Worlds game who wields a power called the Null Force, which is the polar opposite to the Primal Force (the power of Scion, pictured above). While the Primal Force can be used to create and change, the Null Force is used to destroy and end. Through it, Lyla can obliterate matter and energy, as well as see through time to the End of All Things. Needless to say, being able to see eons through time and being cursed to see how all creation is doomed to decay and collapse into nothingness has left the girl almost completely insane (a fact she bemoans in her few moments of clarity). Since her power is the polar opposite of Scion’s, their energies react painfully (for both young women) when near each other.
She’s currently a homeless, wandering little ragamuffin wielding the power to End All Things who has taken a liking to the hero Phoenix (pictured on page 1) after he healed her a few adventures back. Unfortunately, Lyla hasn’t quite figured out how to make her affection apparent without seeming creepy. Dark colors seemed most fitting for her powerset and outlook, and mismatched/worn everything makes her poverty and her connection to decay all the more apparent.
Nice art! I love Mutants and Masterminds. Had a friend pick up Paragons for me at Gen Con. Should be lots of good material in there to steal for my Freedom City game whenever I get around to running it again.
And now for two paragon-type characters who I sketched out recently, and who are going to be introduced into the game in the near future. Orion is formerly a Greek astrophysicist gifted with a magical belt that gives him tremendous strength and the ability to fly. It also enables him to create nigh-invulnerable force fields at will.
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Next up is Solaris, a former astronaut who volunteered to plunge a ship infected with a sentient mechanical parasite into the sun before it could return to Earth to destroy the planet. She emerged a year later with the raw power of a star burning within her, granting her great strength, durability, flight, and the ability to unleash blasts of flame. When the flames are fanned too brightly, Solaris flies into a rage, boosting her strength manifold and making her among the most potentially destructive metahumans in the world
I’ll have something extra fun to post tomorrow morning.
As promised, here’s that “something fun”. As I posted back on page three, Scion has a very deep-seated fear about the evil-looking costume she sometimes finds herself in. As a shapeshifter (matter-shaper, technically, but she’s made out of matter too, afterall), Scion can usually change her outfit with a thought (which is helpful for the whole superhero-ing thing). Unfortunately, as seen on page three, her powers (especially aspects of her shapeshifting) can often get away from her if her emotions get out of control.
Below is the result. An evil version of Scion might be scary, but damn is she fun to draw. While I am quite pleased with the pose, I also really, really like the lighting effects, bathing the character in red light instead of white. The flaming sword also turned out quite nicely, especially after a little glow effect was used to bring out the heat and light of the flames. I also think I’m starting to get a pretty good handle on electrical effects of different types. All in all, I’m pleased with how this one turned out, even if the whole thing is a little less complex (and fun) than the transformation posted on page 3.
What I’m posting now is the character who I’ve pictured above and throughout this thread: Scion, after a journey that took her across several planes of existance that granted her newfound understanding of her powers and finally returned to her a weapon she’d wielded for a short time earlier in the game, but which was lost somewhere amongst the planes. The sword, which originally looked like an oversized butcher’s knife, was called Kai, and now that Scion has had to rebuild his blade, he’s taken a form that’s slightly more acceptable to her.
I’m very pleased with how this image turned out, all things considered. The figure and the pose turned out very well as an attempt to convey a slight hint of wonder on the young woman’s face, but also to be something like an almost triumphant pose. I was also happy with how the lighting effects turned out, particularly the interaction of all the different manifestations of the Primal Force energy whirling around Scion.
But it really is the background that makes me so happy with this piece. I started with the starfield, made from scratch in Photoshop with help from a top-notch tutorial. After that, I created the water layer, trying to make it look mostly realistic, but just stylized enough to compliment the Starry Night Effect I was getting from the rest of the piece. Finally, I created several layers of buildings for the skyline and the lights, which was a seperate layer for each color with a complimenting outer glow, created by copying over and over again a random pattern of upright rectangles. Finally, the starfield and then the city skyline was reflected on the water and distorted with a nice wind effect to add some ripples.
Here’s the finished product (as always, click for the full-sized image):
And the detail work on the sword, Kai, was also pretty fun. Kai’s overall design is somewhere between a katana and a scimitar, with an emphasis on gentle curves and a crystaline appearance. The crystal effect was difficult to obtain, but it involved a lot of copies of a base blue layer, some soft and hard embossing effects, some pixelation effects, some extra erasing, and a whole lot of overlapping transparency and dodge effects. But the end result justified the work, I think.
I’ll post a piece I just finished last night which I’m relatively pleased with. It illustrates a good reason not to mess with someone who can reshape matter around her at will. For clarification of her abilities, this image illustrates Scion using matter-shaping to create a powerful wind (literally moving the air molecules along) and kicking up quite a bit of debris in the process. In-game, this manifests itself as an area damage effect. In-character, this just plain looks cool.
And here’s another piece I finished recently but never posted here. Aurum busting out some alchemy. He’s an alchemic Captain Marvel, just scruffier. I tried to capture that in this piece. I’m relatively satisfied with the pose (especially the cape flair, which is a little remniscent of the scene from the original Transformers movie where Starscream got executed), but I was working more on the lighting effects in this one. I tried to give the whole thing more of a “golden” light than white light, as I do for the lighting in my earlier stuff. (I’ve managed to get away from it recently with the newer Scion pics too).
And for the record, med school eats free time like some kind of nuclear-powered time-eating machine.
And the time-eating machine continues eating my time. I’m having “fun” prepping for my Histology exam on Monday, which covers all the basic tissue types and the cardiovascular system, ammounting to about 250 pages of the textbook altogether.
However, I did manage to finish up this piece this week. This is another look at Ronin, and I think I managed to get a better handle on her actual appearance in this one. Ronin is, in her player’s words, “tiny”. She’s built like a gymnast, and I tried to reflect it better in this piece. Her limbs and trunk are all considerably slimmer, even with her armor (which I made lighter to reflect her overall thinness), but I kept her tall relative to her width to make her tiny build more apparent. I also tried to make her hair a little more coarse, as I did in the piece back in the day of Surge (another Japanese character). I also set Ronin’s eyes a little further apart in this to try to capture her face as distinctly more Japanese than I’ve managed in the past.
Her spear has also been upgraded since last I drew her… now her naginata is an amalgam of Excaliber and the Spear of Longinus (and potentially a katana empowered by a spirit of Mujengoku, one of the Buddhist hells, though Tejuna may or may not currently still be a part of the Naginata right now). The weapon got slimmed down considerably, and the additional blades on it are intended to be a little remniscent of flowers. And yes, the Naginata has two spearheads on it. It’s a superhero game. She can get away with it
The last thing I’ll comment on is the interplay between the purple mists and the white psionic effects. Ronin’s powers usually manifest as flares of white light. I went for crescent-shaped wedges of light wrapped around her weapon and head with interspersed dots of varying size to suggest the buildup and movement of energy. The mists are several different layers of a purple cloud effect with the darker layer wand-selected and removed and the transparency adjusted so that Ronin could still be seen through it. The mists are suggestive of an evil psychic alien egg living in her brain at the moment, which tends to manifest in her mindscape as a shard bleeding corruption out in all directions (which the mists are meant to represent). Plus, disappearing into the mists is just such a ninja thing to do.
Nice art! I love Mutants and Masterminds. Had a friend pick up Paragons for me at Gen Con. Should be lots of good material in there to steal for my Freedom City game whenever I get around to running it again.
Paragons is awesome, if a bit disappointing in places. I mean, it has actual mechanics for superheroes changing the world (like in Superman IV when Supes got the world to give up nuclear weapons). But beyond that, it’s a nice blend of gritty modern-age (ala Heroes) and sort of self-aware post-modern urban fantasy (more like a sober dose of Gaiman).
*nod* Cool stuff as usual, JK. You’ve developed some mighty impressive ‘shop skills, and in a hurry, too. (I think… wasn’t paying attention when you started posting these, too lazy to check).
*nod* Cool stuff as usual, JK. You’ve developed some mighty impressive ‘shop skills, and in a hurry, too. (I think… wasn’t paying attention when you started posting these, too lazy to check).
I enjoy Photoshop too much for my own good. And stay tuned… one of the PCs in the game recently got his power set switched around (quit the Green Lantern Corps-esque Phoenix Flight and has now sold his soul to a devil for hellfire powers), so his costume is due to change in the near future. I might try to try that out this coming week, possibly as a group-shot with the character’s fiance (and new member of our group), whose power set has finally normalized enough that I’m willing to take another stab at her.
The couple in question was formerly Phoenix and Mockingbird, but they’re now known as Warlock and Roc.
Hey JK, can you please resize the large images to fit within the default topic width (probably 600px or less). We will likely be putting a max size somewhere in CSS anyhow, but it’d be sweet if you could fix ‘em for now.
Forum management aside - GREAT WORK man! Love the style!
