Darkfang

Thanks so much for the tip, PsiBug! And the kind words. But mostly the tip right now, because I'm hoping this means fewer people will be driven away by a third party website's user-interface.

Yeah, I'm aware that the site no longer works. When I get a few minutes I'll update my signature and take out the link until I get a new site.

As for the difficulty reading the comic - if anyone can point me in the direction of somewhere I can host the pdf version of the comic for free, I would greatly appreciate it. At the time, hypercomics seemed to be the best option.

You're the first I've heard from who needed to use auto play, and not the forward and back arrows on either side of it. That said, hypercomics was being very difficult last night when I went to post the comic, so I wouldnt be surprised if anyone reports bugs. That site needs a little work, but it seemed like the best place to post the comic.

Galacto Guard #48 - the Return of G'Tak'Nak

I present to you the product of several weeks of feverish work at the sacrifice of spare time! It's a tribute to the early years of comic books - reflecting the nature of the supergroup, and inspired by the story behind issue 10. It was a bit of a rush job, but I think the nature of comic books from the time period it's supposed to be from is a little forgiving in that respect. Anyway, I hope everyone likes it!


P.S. - special thanks to my fiancee for dealing with my obsession with this project, as well as proofreading, cleaning up, etc.

I don't know if I remember any discussion of this a while back (maybe that was just an all-artist SG I'm thinking of,) But are there any global channels set up for fellow artists and art enthusiasts to chat/exchange ideas and tips? If so, where do I sign up? If not, would anyone else be behind starting something like this up?

And just in time for Thanksgiving, I managed to get back to this project and finish up with the colors! Another finished piece to add to my website once I'm done this Shard TF, but for now, here's a photobucket link.

Tarosvan, the Chariot card

Alright, starting this WIP a little late, but with the combination of jury duty/4-5 seperate projects going on, it'll take me some time to get the rest of it done. This is my latest illustration-in-the-works, Tarosvan.

pencils

inks

I'll not go into the background of the character for fear of butchering it horribly, but I will say that the image in the background and the grass dance regalia he is wearing are directly tied to the concept. Coloring and shadow soon to come!

P.S. Depending on how quickly I go through projects, I may post a few other WIPs on this thread, so stay tuned! Hope you guys like how they look.

The latest in a slowly growing collection of commissioned character illustrations is up on my site, for any who'd like to take a look.

Kyou vs Bane

The link will take you directly to the artwork in question, but if you havent seen it yet, please take a look at the rest of the collection if you like. Special thanks to the player of both characters for giving me something fun to draw while camping!

Cheap art paper from a pharmacy stationary aisle. Standard, test-taking-approved #2 pencil. Adobe Photoshop. Given the opportunity, I would probably take advantage of higher quality equipment... one day I'll even have a real art table!

I was going to post this last week, but I had account trouble. For my birthday (last Friday,) my fiancee had a commission done by Brandon of Battletide and Psycharisma, two of our major characters (we have three 'mains' each), and leaders of the C.A.P.E.S., aka the Campus Alliance of Preternatural and Exemplary Students (whew, long sentence!). The result was this display of pure incredible:

Protecting Paragon University!

Thanks go out to Brandon for drawing this amazing scene, and of course to my awesome fiancee for purchasing it!

Funny that this topic is here. While cleaning out their house, my parents came across boxes of my childhood belongings, including a collection of very old artwork, like this:

Chromosphere then

Chromosphere was a character I had designed back in elementary school, when I was just discovering the joys of comic books. According to the date under my signature at the bottom, I made this "character sheet," when I was nine years old. My favorite part - though you probably cannot read it well enough to tell - is the little (tm) next to his name in the descriptions, and the copyright 1990 symbol written in pencil in the far corner, as if doing either of those things would make them legally my intellectual property. If memory serves, this was to stop the other artist kid in my grade from stealing things from my desk and taking credit for them, as he liked to do. Ah, kids...

This was seventeen years ago, and I still remember a LOT about Chromosphere, to the point where I couldnt resist doing a quick little resketch and a cheap coloring job. (this old sketch doesnt show his costume colors, but I still remember them.)

Chromosphere now

This was a lot of fun. I'm hoping to find more old memories during the cleaning.

Started this project Thursday, and now it's finished. I'm psyched to have delivered to my first happy customer! If you'd like to see the finished version, it can be viewed at TONYTOBINART.com , my portfolio/comissions website.

P.S. some other sections of the site arent quite finished yet, so if you wander into a section that is not working, that's why.

clean and inked

A little preview, before I start coloring tomorrow. Tonight.... I sleep! Note that in the pencil version, there's no steam pack on Nemesis. Um... woops. But all fixed now.

The guy I quoted was actually referring to my ability to express things other than combat with body language in this particular case. However, he also said that I should practice my storytelling ability. It's completely true, and something I plan to work on (just not with this particular drawing)

I'd love to draw comic books for a living... but I'm not there just yet. I need to get better at drawing characters with more quality and in less time. I have the education, I just need practice, and these pinup style commissions are perfect for that.

Anyway, my love of talking aside, here's the latest version of the drawing!

semi-complete

I only say semi-complete because only pictures that have deadlines can ever officially be complete. As of now, I do not plan to really go back and work on this drawing any more, so it's "done." That doesnt mean I won't go back and tweak it more if I notice something, or someone here gives a really noteworthy critique.

Flat color - I like the way my line quality comes out after clean-up, primarily because it feels a lot like a page in a coloring book, which makes the next step, flat colors, really easy.

flat color

I love how my last few drawings have come out at this stage, this one included, because they remind me of a single frame of an animated feature. With the last two pics, Nite Raptor and Tephra, I stopped here. But since this picture holds a special place in my heart, I'm going to give it the detail it deserves and go into the realm of Shadow & Highlight. Or I might destroy it in the process, since this step is one that I need the most work with. Either way, this'll take a while, so wish me luck and I'll post it once it's done to at least a satisfactory degree.

And now, before I crash headfirst into my bed, the "cleaned up" version of the pic!

Cleaned up

After I wake up: color!

So as I continue to practice and try to fine tune my artstyle, a conversation is brought to my attention. My fiancee, Ravenbane, and one of our friends from the game were actually chatting about my drawings, and he brought up an interesting point.

"He has drama in his panels. I know he can do sequential action. If he can do, say a romantic interlude as well, then he should be able to find work."

It dawned on me that, while I wasnt sure 110% what he defines as a "romantic interlude," I have never drawn anything even resembling this! All my shots so far have been action or just a pose. So I immediately grabbed a pencil and paper and went right to work, using our main characters. A handful of hours later and I finished the very uncleaned pencils for the picture.

According to Ravenbane, they're good, and she doesnt want me to wait around to post it. But since there's still plenty of work to do, I'm going to call this a work in progress. So here's are two very happily married vampires.

step one

Still to come - the cleaned up version, the flat colored version, and the shadow/highlight version.

Tephra Fire

Nite Raptor

Darkfang and Ravenbane

US Angel

Herr Automaton

Lord Baelor

Kelp Plankton

These are a few examples of my CoH-related projects, starting with the most recent and going back (since I've been told I'm getting better with each one). I'm posting them because my website, Tonytobinart.com, is almost ready to go live. But don't bother going there just yet, it's still just an ugly placeholder page.

When it is ready, I'll be offering commissioned work to the MMO crowd at affordable prices. In the meantime, I thought I'd get the word out and see if anyone would be interested in being some of my first customers. So if any of you art collectors out there are interested, please feel free to toss me a PM.

Hope to hear from you soon!

I nominate my fiancee, Ravenbane. Something about the OP's avatar tells me he can appreciate the need for a token hottie vampire on the list.

Empowerment stations - Neat. Not even close to what I thought they'd be, but I guess that's your fault for setting the bar so high with a good game

One thing worries me about Empowerment stations, though... will these just be paperweights that are fueled by Salvage? In other words, will this "easily affordable" item turn into 5 hours of salvage farming for a 15 minute buff that grants a 1% resist to psychic damage? Will the buffs last long enough for SG members to earn enough salvage to get another buff? Will they do anything substantial? Please, put my mind at ease.

Storage Bins - We have to build these? Does this mean we need a worktable, and thus need energy and control? And more importantly, will these bins CONSUME energy and control just by sitting there holding things? In other words, is this ALSO content for the smaller SGs or not.

Also, while this is a conclusion I'm jumping to (please no one assume I heard this somewhere), will storage bins only be placeable in vaults? They sound like something that would logically go in a vault, but that would end up being a 150k prestige room that people uninterested in raids have so far been able to avoid purchasing.

Finally, the new decorative items and SG logos. Incredible. I have no worries here. Decorative items FTW, or something like that. Think we could get decorative versions of some of the functional base items? For example, the repair drone and the holodisplay... I could give a rat's rear what they do, they look sweet in my sci-fi SG's space station. If you're worried that people will place 5 dozen decoy items in their base to throw off raiders, I submit that decorative items cannot be highlighted.

Finally, apologies, this is not exactly my most eloquent (sp?) post... it's 5:30 AM, the Gary Coleman cartoon show is on tv, and my brain has officially turned to pudding. Apparently sleep is a good thing.

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Basically: if it was meant to be taken down by more than 1 team, it gives the badge. Mission versions are scaled down versions that are more like AV's, thus able to be defeated by a single team, and thus do not give the badge.

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You might need to buff Giant Monsters then. There's not one in the game that requires more than one team to defeat.

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Will do.

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Also, if all these monsters were meant to be taken down by more than one team, why should only one team get the badge? Forgive me if I'm mistaken, it's been a while since I've tackled a giant monster, but last I checked the badge was only given to the team that does the most damage. This was to prevent, I guess, people from coming in, swatting the thing once and sitting at a safe distance for the badge. And it works nicely for that scenario, but consider this scenario:

Team A: Deals a total of 2000 damage
Team B: Deals a total of 1999 damage
Team A: "WooooO! Badge earned!"
Team B: "@#$%... well, that was a big fat waste. But at least we kept team A's scrappers alive with our defenders."

So I ask in general, but especially if you go around buffing monsters up, let the badge go to all who help to defeat the monster, not just the team with the highest level damage dealers.

Again, strike this completely from the record if I don't have my facts straight. I do know that this does not apply to Lusca, but I'm pretty sure it still goes for Adamaster, Krakens, etc...

I'm gonna play the kiss$%& and side with Jonyu here, as I play both Tankers and Brutes.

Simply put, Brutes and Scrappers are not Tankers. They go by the same basic rule of thumb as the blasters, "Kill before they kill you," with the ability to last a little longer. They deal *far* more damage than an equal level tanker, and while the tank can last a lot longer in combat, they need to manage their endurance to keep toggles going while dishing out, until the highest of levels, less damage than a containment-happy controller.

The -def of Unyielding slightly compensates for the +def of Invincibility. Yes, you get it later... that has been the point of secondary sets since the launch of CoH. My invun/energy tank didn't get his first decent attack until level 35... everything before that is best used for punchvoke while your teammates do all the hard work. But it DOES become available to you, and it is an incredible power, especially for Brutes, as the auto-hit AoE taunt will help you rack up Fury.

My advice:

1) slot up unyielding for resists. It grants a decent resist to all damage types but psionic. You'll still be getting hit for more (until invincibility) but you'll be taking less. Unyielding is much more than a simple mez resist.

2)Use it on an "as needed" basis. My one Brute uses his secondary toggles like pouches in a utility belt. There are times when he can run around fine without ANY toggles going, so I spare myself the end drain and only run one or two as the immediate situation demands.

3)be patient, keep grinding. Once you get invincibility, you'll probably forget all about this problem

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We just received tech that will allow players to pass buffs onto certain powers (such as Blizzard).

[/ QUOTE ] Um...what does this mean exactly?

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I second this question!

EDIT: I trust the posters who have already answered this but I wouldn't mind an amen from a dev.

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It's pretty much what other posters already suggested. Many effects in the game are actually temporary pets (Blizzard, Fulcrum Shift, Caltrops, Burn, Ice Patch, etc). Since they are distinct entities, they are spawned fresh and buffless. This change allows the designers specify that a pet should get copies of buffs on the creator (Damage and To-Hit inspirations, Power Boost, Build Up/Aim, Accelerate Metabolism, Fulcrum Shift, etc). So yes, you could potentially Power Boost an Ice Storm, and having Fortitude could increase your Burn damage.

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1) you included Fulcrum Shift as a temporary pet... mistake, right? Sorry if this was asked before.

2)How will this change Phantom Army? Can they now be buffed? And can they now be debuffed if this is the case? Because the worst case scenario I'm seeing is that you'll be giving Illusion controllers actual pets that can be buffed, but NOT debuffed, making them insanely overpowered in comparison to other controller sets.

Ravenbane and I have been a RL bf/gf for years, and more or less all of our characters are linked in some way, be they married, college or highschool sweethearts, hero/sidekick, , etc. That goes for heroes and villains.

BUMP IN THE NIGHT

Starting tomorrow, the BUMP in the NIGHT supergroup will be recruiting. The stats:

Theme: Urban Legend/Fairy Tale monster supergroup.

Who would fit?: ghosts, goblins, ghouls, witches, devils, werewolves, vampires, nymphs, succubi, banshees, bogeymen, zombies, etc. The best indicator - if it's mentioned in campfire tales or hiding under a child's bed, it more than fits the theme.

Leader: The Leeds Devil

Roleplay: preferred

If interested, hunt down and speak to Leeds Devil in-game. Global tells to @Darkfang or @Ravenbane will work, too. Message boards coming soon.