Volunteering to do Portraits

[siddh]

Hello, recently I've started doing some artwork as a hobby. If anyone needs a portrait image for their era or unit, or something like that, I'd like to volunteer making them. So if you post a request here, with details on what it should approximately contain, and I'll try and and make a portrait, but you don't actually have to use/like it, if it doesn't match with your taste. Which brings us to the next point, I'm not a particularly good artist - or actually I'm not not an artist at all in a formal sense. So please bear in mind that there are plenty of people who will produce better results around on this forum!
Anyway so to sum up:

1. Volunteering to do portraits
2. Post requests and I'll try and do one
3. If you don't like the result, that's ok
4. I'm not an expert and the results may vary a lot

Sound good?

[vultraz]

Do you have any samples of recent works to post? It'd be helpful for people to gauge whether they want a portrait in that style.

[Implementor37]

Could you do a portrait for a Dark Commander/Dark General or a Dark Fighter/Dark Champion? (Dark Legion--available in several add-ons, including War of Legends and Ageless Era). I'm working on a campaign featuring the Dark Legion, and these two unit-lines will be my main characters. Unfortunately, they don't have existing portraits, and my portrait-drawing skills amount to zero. As a result, anything you could do would be 10,457% better than anything I could do on my own. Also, I would prefer 1 portrait to cover both the Commander/General and 1 portrait to cover the Fighter/Champion. (That should also make it easier on you if you want to do them) If you don't want to, that's ok and I will continue to just use the base frame as a portrait. I've attached the images below so that you can see them and decide if you would like to do them. (Fighter and Commander are L2 and Champion/General are L3) Thanks for the willingness to consider drawing portraits!

[siddh]

Started doing a portrait for the dark fighter earlier this morning, I'm not sure how long this will take, but will probably be ready today anyway. I have no idea if you're going to like the style, but we'll see!

****

Alright I got at least one version ready So what do you think?

[Implementor37]

Looks like a great start! I do have a suggestion--darken the armor a little bit. These guys consider themselves the "Dark Legion," so I imagine they would be smoking their armor or something to keep it a dark gray, rather than polishing it to a shine. While the eyes are a little big, I think it fits this unit--this unit has the "terror" ability which makes adjacent enemies fight worse. The eyes are a little ... unsettling, so I think that fits great!

[siddh]

I got a bit lazy with the armor it's hard (at least for me) to figure out how it should look like and reflect light, and didn't end up doing it properly.. Anyway I darkened the armor a tiny bit, and changed the blueish color towards purple in the chest piece, and slightly adjusted the pads too.

[Implementor37]

Great Job! Any chance you could do a variation with a smirk as a facial expression instead of this astonishment? The character I'm thinking of using this for is very sarcastic, so both would be nice. If you would rather be done with this guy, that's totally fine.

On an unrelated note, I found this guy:

Haven't figured out what this guy will do yet, but he sure looks cool!

poltergeist.png (2.17 KiB) Viewed 5473 times

I don't know if you'd be interested in drawing this guy--he just looks like he'd be fun to draw!

[siddh]

Yeah I suppose I can try and create a smirk, but it's pretty complicated, expressions are hard to draw and control. Well at least for me, since I am not proper artist. I was sort of satisfied with the blank look of the character, but that in part occurred so that I was just doing something and when it looked like it would work with the idea, then I'd stop trying to change it. The approach was pretty straightforward, I thought that "dark fighter" sounds evil and cold, looking over the shoulder gives a bit defensive impression, but the character also seems somewhat confrontational, I think the eyes are a bit snakeish and got a bit of this Cristopher Walken thing going on, the blank looks in that sense goes with the evil/cold theme. So I stumbled around managed to get something that fits, I didn't know if you would like it, but so far it seems it was a success.. Anyway so the smirk thing is hard coz when people 'really' smile it goes to the eyes as well, and so I'd have to change the whole expression quite a bit, trying to change just the mouth would sort of give this fake-smile impression, especially if the eyes remain as they are....

Anyway today I'm doing laundry, but I wake up early tomorrow and have no where to go so I could try both of these things, the smirk and also the poltergeist character.. But the poltergeist.. Hmm in the iconart it looks like there's no hands, like it's a hollow suit? Is this impression correct?

[Implementor37]

Ok. Keep the expression as it is--thanks! Essentialy I think this character is a mostly-invisble ghost, so you see his suit, hat, and knives, but not any of his actual body/face. To me, he looks like the kind of ghost who loves reads a few too many spy novels.

[siddh]

Alright I got something done so far, basically I've not decided if I should try and draw some features for the poltergeist and also not sure yet how to include swords into the picture, and also I made version with some sort of smirk for the dark fighter, I'm not sure if you like that.. Personally I think it looks somehow akward, but upto you But anyway here's what I got done sofar today:

Ops.. I forgot to remove the 'model image' from the poltergeist drawing I mean the little icon, I put that in the picture so I can look at it while drawing

Alright came back to some kind of sword for the poltergeist portrait, I'm not sure if this is any good though. Should try and look into swords properly and figure out how they're supposed to look like.... But it's something

[Implementor37]

Hey! Those are great! It might not be a "proper" sword in the geist portrait, but it looks really ghostly! And I really like that portrait for the dark fighter! Thanks a lot siddh!

[siddh]

Glad you like them!

[SFault]

Very nice coloring, shading and texturing. The problem is the proportions of the face. It's very round. Even if it's not a human I still would have more adjusted face features. I made a quick pushover(?) on the image to demonstrate the point.

[siddh]

Very nice coloring, shading and texturing. The problem is the proportions of the face. It's very round. Even if it's not a human I still would have more adjusted face features. I made a quick pushover(?) on the image to demonstrate the point.

You're correct and I did notice this myself too, basically the features of the face would need to be moved a bit to the right and in the process probably narrowed down slightly, however, I don't think it's particularly a problem, I think it's fine as it is. Your demonstration shows though that the face looks a bit more natural that way. Although if you actually did that then you'd just have created new distortions into the proportions, so perhaps that's not so good. I was actually contemplating on if I should try and fix that, but then decided it's probably not worthwhile.

There's some torque along the Y axis to the clockwise direction and some torque along the the X axis to the counterclockwise direction. The charater has a slightly small chin, and in dimension is further back than the front of the face.

I think the primary is the right eye side (left hand side) from the nose and the face would need to be compressed a bit. So The face would need to be slightly rotated counterclockwise. And to reduce the protrusion to the left hand side, I think the whole face would need to be narrowed down slightly.

The roundness of the face in particular isn't such a problem, but rather that it extends too far in relation to the head's location. Basically I started drawing it too far to the left and also failed with the angles involved in the position of the head.

I created this image to demonstrate, but note that in this image the rotated cross follows the center of the chin which is further back so the actual rotation shouldn't be that intense anyway:

[doofus-01]

Hi siddh,

It's good to see someone doing this sort of thing! I'm not an artist in my real life either, but I screw around with this sort of thing when I can, so I'm going to say what I think. If you disagree, no hard feelings.

You got a lot of the details done pretty well: The hair was pretty convincing; the metal was pretty clearly metal (and this is not true for a lot of the mainline portraits, like the drakes or dwarves). I also know what you mean about random chance taking control when it comes to drawing faces. I think your original image would have been good for an evil, arrogant, very young aristocrat, who had a lot to learn.

I've attached an image with some quick modifications:
1. The roundness of the face has already been mentioned, but I hope my version shows some way to deal with that.
2. The face also seemed lopsided, I've trimmed it down to my satisfaction, but who knows. It is good to flip the image as you work on it, to combat the complacency that afflicts us as we work on these things. You might have addressed this with your last post, but I'm not sure because it's not how I think about this.
3. What sort of character were you thinking about for this guy? Did you want a young, arrogant lord? I figured if this is supposed to be a "dark soldier", he'd be a bit more rough and wizened. At the very least, he'd be post-pubescent and would have some facial stubble. But that's just my take, in the end it's between you and Implementor37.
4. Possibly the most important point: This is a very tight crop of the figure, it's like one of the old portraits (BfW 1.2?) The crop now is usually just below the hips, so the upper body is completely drawn.
5. There were a lot of semitransparent pixels in your image. I'm not sure how your did your layering, but there should be more overlap.