Artwork

[Johnny Awesome]

I'm really trying to improve the presentation of my game, but I can't seem to find any artwork that I can use, like Viper Agent art for Viper character sheets or hexagonal headshots etc...

Is there anything out there like this? Where can I find it?

PS: Same goes for major villains. It would be nice to get some more artwork to use with Hero Designer images etc...

[mvoncannon]

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=463

Go to the last one, or close to it, and go to Storn's Page.

You specific request, I can't help with.

[Flames]

I have PDFs of a lot of the HERO books, so what I do is take screenshots of the artwork I want, crop them down to the size I need, and incorporate them that way.

If there's only a hardcopy, you could perhaps snap photos of the artwork using a digital camera, maybe set on black-and-white mode with the contrast turned way up. Kind of a hassle, but worth it if you need that visual reference when referring to a stack of character sheets.

[Starwolf]

Or you could use a flatbed scanner to scan the image then crop and save. I have seen refurbished scanners for as little as $20.00. But I would second the Storns artwork thread as a first choice.

If you are interested in 3D character portraits myself and several other folks here on the Hero boards do them (I work on commission, but some offer free assistance).

[Dholcrist]

Or you could use a flatbed scanner to scan the image then crop and save. I have seen refurbished scanners for as little as $20.00. But I would second the Storns artwork thread as a first choice.

I second this. Had the same exact problem (correction: have) a couple of weeks ago, and some kind fellows pointed me to Storn's thread, which has been immensely helpful, though unfortunately his non-super Sci-Fi art is somewhat few and far between (which is what I specifically was looking for).

Other places I've used were a few D&D D20 sites, back when WotC (I know, evil) actively added things like character portraits to their site. Also, being a huge comic book nerd I've gone through a couple dozen dozen of my issues for good head shots of characters that I could scan and then doctor that up in Paint or Photoshop. It's worked out pretty well so far.

Though by all means, anybody finds a good repository of professional looking character portraits, let me know!

[Curufea]

There are amateur sites - elfwood (http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/) and deviantart (http://www.deviantart.com/) that could be of use. Of course the majority is not professional looking, being amateur sites.

[Dholcrist]

Another option I've been meaning to further explore would be the use of conceptual art books from movies and such. The Star Wars Art books tend to be really fantastic for sci-fi stuff, and there are some Lord of the Rings and other genres of movies that you can probably find some good books for. Only down side to going this route (and only reason I haven't myself further exploited it) is the high prices of the books themselves, especially for just scanning a few headshots.

It's really strange that nobody has compiled art for rpg's before in such a manner. Go figure.

[GreyGuardian]

I used city of villains to create some viper-ish costumes. Took some screen shots. Colorized a viper logo image, shrunk it down and plopped it onto the suits in the screen shots and... well here's a sheet of viper agents. If I had taken longer I probably could have gotten better lighting and background contrast, but they worked well enough. I've done card board figs of some player characters as well using the same technique. Anyhoo, I hope you find it useful... the empty rtf document was posted somewhere on these boards as I recall. Very handy for quick card board figs.

Another thing I meant to try is print out a playing card sized tent with the character image and just use numbered tokens on the board with the number appearing on the tent. so you can at a glance, see who is who, and see what is what as it were.

Whoops, the graphics dropped out... turns out the file should be 40 megabytes so, there's the blank and the individual images I used. 4 variants front and back - some assembly required :).

[RPMiller]

Well that would be the blank tent mini. How about the one with the pictures? ;)

I thought that zip was awfully small to contain images.

[aylwin13]

Here is a scan of the VIPER agent from CU (I believe) that I did a quick colorization on; as well as a sheet of numbered cardboard minis, using the the same agent pic.

[Edsel]

Good work on the colorized VIPER Agent. Have some rep.

[aylwin13]

Good work on the colorized VIPER Agent. Have some rep.

Thanks Edsel. This was my first attempt at coloring a grayscale pic. I think it turned out pretty well.

[Comic]

Wait. We're allowed to rep people for talent?

Then.. repped!