Team Chow II - Team Milk of Amnesia

[Nightblue]

haha, movements definitely are fun... like the good ole days of art crusade, before the judges vanished

flourine: the designs are really coming together, and the lady is EVIL! eek!

moai:The new one is super badass. Curious how the good side will be

tried to push my warrior towards east asia/China. Also doodled an evil version. Not happy with either of their poses/anatomy, so these will likely serve as nothing more than design sketches. The bottom lighting of the evil guy is looking rather fun to do though!

[fluorine]

my dark elf girl resting~~~just a quicky for nothing....LOL.

Nightblue: Design is coming alone pretty well, bottom lighting almost always make thing evil/creepy/interesting~~~ I like your good human though, he looks like a "boyfriend" type, positive, reliable, good sense of humor~~~ I think if it's a RPG game, the lawful good human paladin might have something for the chaotic good dark elf rouge....yeah~~~

so now we have a dark elf female rouge, a human fighter/paladin(?), a orc, and....Don't know what burtzum is up to.

[Lexius]

Very cool team, real nice stuff. I just saw this picture, it looks great.
Do you guys know this is handmade or something from nature "itself"?

[Burtzum]

Do you guys know this is handmade or something from nature "itself"?

Made by nature, killed and positioned by man. It is two sea urchin skeletons, one placed on top of another.

[Burtzum]

hey dudes. apologies for my absence. here is a sketch riffing off of Moai's samurai dwarf.

[fluorine]

Burtzum, he looks pretty cool~ I like the helmet on the left, the bird skull might be a bit too much, and not very practical.

[Nightblue]

Burt - looking cool! I like the first helmet also. It's a really neat shape. I've just realizing that we have many a melee class... maybe your scan be the shaman? If not, I'll try to make a mage or something to make sure our entry is varied enough.

flourine - the sketch is quite nice. I like the background a lot.

Digging into the goodly warrior. Do not like his legs and feet... will look for reference tomorrow.

[fluorine]

Thanks Nightblue~

The goody two-shoes human warrior is looking good~~~~I'll see if I can have my good dark elf rouge date him~~~LOL, but what happened to his helmet? I like the wingy design before. Now it looks a bit too....ah....too round....(lacking a better word for it).

I was just thinking, maybe we need to give our chracter names, I mean, I can't always go like "My dark elf girl" or "your good human"....I sounded like a pimp or something.

[Burtzum]

I've just realizing that we have many a melee class... maybe yours can be the shaman?

Ok, I'll make him look more like a shaman after I get home from work tonight. I'll try to sketch an orc shaman as well. Then you all can tell me which one to do for my characters. Sound like a plan?

I was just thinking, maybe we need to give our chracter names

Names can be fun. Was it you or Nightblue I was talking to on MSN about how much time we spend in the beginning of a game picking names and working on the look of our characters? I spend hours at the 'make your character' screens.

Currently having fun coming up with names for characters I play in a MMO called Asherons Call. I gave myself some rules for naming: they must all start with 'Bur' (an element of my real name) and the last name must be a variant of 'Locrian', which was the name of my original character back in 1999.
Burzi bin Loqrian (mage character from the desert)
Burzu Lokrianji (melee martial arts asian character)
Burza Locrisun (european archer character)
Getting harder to think of more names following my rules. Hrmm. Burhti al Loqrian. Burht von Locrien. heh. fun.

Anyway.... Should we give each race its own naming conventions/rules? Or just don't worry about it too much and just come up with something cool sounding and leave it at that?

[Moai]

Burton- Very cool design, man! I'm digging the muntjac-like skull headdress. Unlike the others, I don't prefer the plain skull over the one with the bird beak; I feel that both could work equally well. I'm looking forward to what kind of shamans you cook up.

Nightblue- It's shaping up well!

So, here's the good troll twin. I made his hair more flowing, his expression more open and less glowering, his horns more antler-like, changed his sword, and made his armor more cloth-based and more purely samurai, whereas the evil version was more samurai spliced with Lord of the Rings orc. I'm trying out a few different color schemes; your opinions would help here.

As far as names go, I don't know how useful coming up with naming conventions for each race would be, since we're only doing one character per race. So, I'm thinking just go with what sounds cool, and give each character's name a distinct flavor.
As for my own character's name, I've found that I've started thinking of him simply as the Bastard.

[Burtzum]

just got off work. Realized we don't have an archer/crossbow/thrown weapons guy. Also don't seem to have a stealthy assassin or thief type. Fluorine's character seems like the backstabbing type, but way too many dangling bits to fill that roll. Too noisy for sneaking around. She just back-stabs you after sleeping with you I guess. Maybe Fluorine's can be the bard type character. Since she seems to be the one most interested in the instrument idea. And also I think she mentioned her character used to be an entertainer of sorts. Moai's seems to be the most assasinyish at the moment I guess. With the fairly light armor and bare feet. And third eye with night sight? infra red? boobie vision?

Hmm what if his third eye is usually closed and just open when he needs it to see through blouses? Kinda like that annoying granny character in Farscape:


I'm not sure if they ever explained why her eye is sometimes closed/open/half open.
or maybe the good guy's is open cause hes all enlightened and all that, while bad dude's is closed. I kinda like the nightvision idea though. Hrm. enough rambling. I work on shamans now.

[fluorine]

LOL, my character is actually going for a dark elf rouge/assassin type. and I think if you're fast enough, it doesn't really matter if you make noises, you can just jump in for the kill.

But I'll reduce her accessories, don't want her personality get lost in her costume.

And, remember guys, we kind of agreed to make it a band, so my character is the dancer, you guys need to come up with something~We're the traveling thief/assassin/merc band, how happy~

I'll see if I can come up with some environment, I did a quick piece this morning, but not sure if i get the feel right. Are we going for a more urban/civilized setting or a more rural/primitive setting?

I haven't think of any cool name yet... for all the RPG character I named, there's only one rule, start with letter "F", I know...it's pretty lame.......LOL. I think I'll give her a Chinese name.

[Moai]

For my character's instrument, I'm planning on a shakuhachi. For his environment, my current idea is to have him descending some old, decayed stone steps in some mysterious Japanese forest type environment, shadier and mistier for the evil version and lighter for the good version.
As for character class, I dunno yet.

[fluorine]

A quicky (crappy) environment for my character, an old oriental town.

Moai, I really like your character, he looks sad for some reason, and I like how the human emotion coming out of a rather "monster" type of character.

[Moai]

'Nother color scheme. I did this one a few days ago, but never posted it.
To answer Burtzum, I'm not sure what his third eye does. Spirit vision? Second-sight? Foresight? Hindsight? I dunno.

[fluorine]

Just a little memo for Burt:

For the final presentation, we decided to do a dyptic mirror image of the good and evil. The instrument elements still applies, but just as an accessory. Good and evil side should looks similar but with little variations in color, pose, clothing, accessories, as if you're looking into a mirror but see another version of yourself. And the two images should have their own composition so they'll look like complete portraits by itself, but together they'll form a new composition.

Nightblue suggest some kind of frame to bring this two images together.

Here's some examples by Clamp, although they're anime/manga style, the format is what we want for final presentation.

[Nightblue]

coming along nicely, moai

Flourine, nice environ shots.. I'd better give some thoughts to my background as well.

messed more with the warrior. I think I'll fully render him out after all... it seems to help me add more life to his design as I go.

[fluorine]

Nightblue he's looking good~ The armor is really nice. and I like the skull on his belt, maybe I should add some skull or bone elements on my character. and the horn is looking really good.

But I still think his helmet is a bit too round on the top part, would be nice to add some decoration elements to balance it a bit.

[Moai]

Looking great, Nightblue!
Urgh...loads of other art projects jumping at me at once. A freelance job (), a logo design for a friend, and a birthday drawing for my cousin. I'll try my hardest not to let Team ChoW get lost in the mix, but frankly it's a lower priority than these other things.

[fluorine]

a rough color composition for final piece.

[Nightblue]

nice compositions, flourine! Love the poses. I wonder if it would showcase the characters better if the composition zooms in on them a bit more.

[fluorine]

Thanks nightblue. I'll zoom in on the characters more.

[Nightblue]

warrior design final, with pose fixes and defined weapon and other forms of clean-up.

I started messing with compositions and I think I found a good pose... will post when I actually have something other than stick-figures to show

[fluorine]

great work~ I need to keep up~~~

[Burtzum]

ugh. past week has flown by.

[fluorine]

I'm glad you're still with us Burt, you got me worried a bit there~~~

Love your dwarf. I love the overall design of the left one, but I think the helmet of the middle one is stronger. And I really like the shoulder plate of the right one.

[fluorine]

rough color comp for the good character. I don't like the new pose, so goes back to the old ones. Change the costume a bit, simplified the accessories, and get her covered up a bit more. Recently I was criticized of having too much detail, so I try to keep everything simple this time, stick with one or two base color for my character.

Background looks pretty bad for now...LOL, but I'll make it look more sophisticated.

[fluorine]

A new layout:

Here's a new composition for my good character (OMG...she's still nameless!!!) Anyway, I was talking to Burt, and he decide to do a simple mountain background. I'm not sure if we're going for the graphic/decorative background or we're going for a scenery of sort. So I did another layout design. For the evil side, i'm just gonna do the same composition, only it's gonna be a night scene.

We need to decide this fast, whether we're going for a scenery background or a graphic background, because the lighting and color would be completely different. and the deadline is near, we need to move fast.

[Burtzum]

I like the bamboo forest idea. I think it is stronger than the graphic background. It can lend itself more to mood and giving a feel for the character. A bamboo forest can be serene and beautiful and delicate but I can also see it easily being creepy with dim light and mist and crotchety skeletal looking bamboo... some perhaps broken with sharp edges...

oh, and here is my masterpiece I showed fluorine earlier:

[fluorine]

I was thinking about the same idea with bamboo, so the good side is the beautiful summer morning kind of feeling, and the evil side is creepy foggy night with bottom lit lighting.

And burtzum, your master piece is just wonderful~~~you even give the good side some flowers, how cute~~~LOL.