The Energon Pub

by **Wingz** » Fri May 04, 2018 3:52 am

You've likely seen the HMW forum. It's the very last one on the list of forums. In case you've not visited or know much about it, you build a team of 12 characters from a rotating list of alt images and send them on missions to bring back energon and gain experience points. The images are very simple, but it leaves room for the imagination. I've taken a few of my HMW characters and created concept art for them.

In HMW, I align myself with being a Maximal. While the faction may not exist in the game, using all animal alt images is one of the ways I role play it. I'll show the alt picture provided in HMW for each character shown followed by a brief description and the pictures. So far, I've only created concept art for two of them:

Nightwing
Raven/Panther fuzor

Specific Regions
Fuzor - Robot
Wings - Back
Fur - Shoulders/Hips/Thighs/Behind Calves
Feet (Back) - pull apart to create feet in robot mode

Steelsong
Dolphin

Specific Regions
Dolphin - Robot
Fins - Head
Dorsal - Elbows
Tail - Chest
Nose/Head - Shoulders
Sides - "Wingspan" (on the back)

If you have any questions about them, feel free to ask. I plan to draw their beast modes, also. Possibly smaller pictures for mechanical ideas, as well, such as a step by step of how Nightwing's gauntlets retract, etc.

Anyway, I hope some beast era fan out there enjoys these. Or some HMW nerd like myself ;)^

EDIT: I decided to start editing in the newer pictures as I fix the lineart and/or color them. That way, the newer ones aren't scattered throughout the thread :lol:

Slow process is slow.

News Credits: 1350 · by **ZeroWolf** » Fri May 04, 2018 6:56 am

Love your style wingz! Have you got plans to colour these? Half of my team is beasts (+ one monster) would have loved to have done the full 12 as wolves but I would have ran out of wolf-like names :lol:

by **Wingz** » Fri May 04, 2018 10:35 am

ZeroWolf wrote:Love your style wingz! Have you got plans to colour these? Half of my team is beasts (+ one monster) would have loved to have done the full 12 as wolves but I would have ran out of wolf-like names

Thank you, Zero! I'm glad you like them =D

I do have plans to color them. Picking the dolphin parts from Steelsong's armor is difficult due to the nature of dolphins being smooth. There are also a few minor details I plan to add/fill at that time, such as Nightwing's mouth and both of their Maximal symbols (for whatever reason, I forgot to ink it before taking pictures...on both of them :-?

).

I imagine a pack of wolves would be both interesting and fun to make art for. You could call the gallery something like: 'The many ways to draw a wolf TF~' I guess it's good that each of the wolf alts are so different, visually? :lol:

by **Wingz** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 4:28 pm

Sooo, I really wanted to try my hand at digital coloring...

That said, I don't have a tablet, but I bought a month of Photoshop to try it out. It was tedious, because I realized all the flaws in when trying to paint it and ended up zooming in to 200% and fixing/remodeling/cleaning the lineart (which is incredibly time consuming with a mouse...)

It was a fun experience, regardless, and I think the picture looks a lot clearer now :lol:

While I see a few flaws with it, it took about 6 days of work to clean up and won't get much better without remodeling entire limbs to fix 10 degrees of an angle, so to speak.

That said, I hope she turned out well :MAXIMAL:

News Credits: 1350 · by **ZeroWolf** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 4:44 pm

Looks pretty good for your first attempt at doing it digitally. I too know the pain of doing line art clean up, it was a pain sometimes.

by **Wingz** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 5:08 pm

ZeroWolf wrote:Looks pretty good for your first attempt at doing it digitally. I too know the pain of doing line art clean up, it was a pain sometimes.

Thank you and much appreciated, Zero. Was a bit nervous about posting it :lol:

The legs, the gauntlet, and the back wing were the most tedious #-o

I actually wonder how much time having a tablet would have saved me. :shock:

News Credits: 1350 · by **ZeroWolf** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 6:49 pm

Probably a lot, everyone i knew who had one, swore by them but they were expensive. I was too poor to get one so I had to make do with a mouse ad keyboard. It wasn't so bad once you got the hang of it.

by **Phasewing** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 7:43 pm

Oh, I love the colors on Nightwing, wingz!

Also if you're speaking of tablets, I've been using a wacom intuos pro tablet for my digital drawing purposes, but you don't need terribly expensive ones to draw. I know the simple wacom intuos pen tablet is at least 99 usd... there are probably other brands, perhaps cheaper, just need to research to suit your needs+cost.

by **Hydrargyrus** » Mon Jun 25, 2018 3:27 pm

So... I kind of just randomly clicked here from the creative round-up, but I saw something...

Wingz wrote:I bought a month of Photoshop to try it out.

Have you tried Gimp?

Wingz wrote:It was tedious, because I realized all the flaws in when trying to paint it and ended up zooming in to 200% and fixing/remodeling/cleaning the lineart

Have you tried Adobe Illustrator?

I'm not trying to be smart/annoying; I really do feel that these could be good things to look into.

by **Wingz** » Fri Jul 06, 2018 5:53 pm

MagicDeath wrote:I'm not trying to be smart/annoying; I really do feel that these could be good things to look into.

And I appreciate it greatly

any and all tips are most welcome!

I have not tried Gimp yet, but I hear good things about it. I started with Krita, but I was having trouble finding clear tutorials. Most I found were using Photoshop, which is why I started with it. My sub for Photoshop ended, so I might start another project using Gimp now that I sort of know what to look for.

I have Adobe Illustrator, but I've not looked into it. If it'll make cleaning up those pictures more time-efficient, I'll definitely give it a try :lol:

Thank you very much for the suggestions! :MAXIMAL:

by **Wingz** » Sat Jul 28, 2018 9:10 pm

So, I finally managed to rework redo Steelsong's lineart. Admittedly, I'm not the best at inking, so my rough sketches look very, well...rough XD Going to start posting them as they're cleaned up as opposed to before, since they become much different pictures afterwards. :lol:

There are also a few new tricks I'd like to try with coloring, so I'm going to start coloring her starting tomorrow. In the future, I may go back and redo Nightwing's body if this one turns out well. :MAXIMAL:

News Credits: 1350 · by **ZeroWolf** » Sun Jul 29, 2018 3:53 am

Looks good wingz :-)

by **Wingz** » Sun Jul 29, 2018 4:40 pm

ZeroWolf wrote:Looks good wingz

Thank you, Zero!

I appreciate the feedback on it!

Coloring her has been very fun so far :lol:

Taking my time but still shouldn't take nearly as long as cleaning the lineart does. Key word: "shouldn't"...but knowing my OCD... :-s

News Credits: 1350 · by **ZeroWolf** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 3:48 am

You can never rush art :-)

these pieces take as long as they need just like me and my writing :lol:

by **Wingz** » Sun Aug 12, 2018 3:01 pm

So yea...this took a LOT longer than I thought it would in order to do it the way I wanted. Lots of life stuff going on didn't help, either :lol:

Things I tried:

- I tried adding a bit of a 3D effect with the purple parts to the armor by using different colors and angles.

- Opacity and flow settings to create a sort of glow effect. I'm not sure how most people do it, but I wanted to see if I could figure it out on my own first. This is what I ended up with.

- Color variation. I was rewatching Beast Wars Neo and paying closer attention to the coloring in cells with higher production values. What I noticed was a minimum of 5 shades per color, so I tried to get close to that with mine.

I like how she turned out, but I might be biased since she took me so long to color :lol:

At the very least, I like this style of coloring much better than Nightwing's style. Steelsong's style just looks more fluid.

Again, to see a more clear, higher resolution version of this, it can be seen here. I'm not sure how to post the images bigger, like in the round-ups, otherwise I would. The smaller version loses a lot of detail.

News Credits: 1350 · by **ZeroWolf** » Sun Aug 12, 2018 3:19 pm

That is really good there Wingz, I like the jewel effect.

I also think you've got the 3d effect down, looking at her mid torso section, it does look like layers instead of two flat colours next to each other.

In short, I really liked this piece :-)

by **Wingz** » Sun Aug 12, 2018 3:34 pm

ZeroWolf wrote:That is really good there Wingz, I like the jewel effect.

I also think you've got the 3d effect down, looking at her mid torso section, it does look like layers instead of two flat colours next to each other.

In short, I really liked this piece

Thank you, Zero! =) She took about twice as long to color, but I like how she turned out much better than Nightwing. With the jewel, I thought about puting a Maximal symbol in it, as it's intended to be her rub sign, but I ended up deciding against it.

I wish I knew how to make the images bigger in the thread

The 3D effect is in quite a few areas, but the torso and hips are the only areas where it's visible at this size. Was a lot of fun to make, regardless :lol:

I'll be sticking with this style of coloring and just work on glow effects and texture variation with the shading (such as when coloring fur or scales - always something to improve on!).

News Credits: 1350 · by **ZeroWolf** » Sun Aug 12, 2018 3:41 pm

You could try and link to bigger versions of the art through photobucket etc..

I think you made the right decision about her rub sign but if you feel like expermenting in the future, colouring digitally means you can see how it turns out without worrying about messing up the whole picture. I do miss drawing myself and that thread I have around here somewhere...

Like Bad Wolf on Facebook · by **Bad Wolf** » Sat Aug 25, 2018 3:38 pm

took me long enough to get here (and comment) :oops:

i really love your style, your line work reminds me of another artist i met through the boards way back when.. and your combo coloring/rendering makes it pop. way cool

by **Wingz** » Sat Aug 25, 2018 6:12 pm

Bad Wolf wrote:took me long enough to get here (and comment)

i really love your style, your line work reminds me of another artist i met through the boards way back when.. and your combo coloring/rendering makes it pop. way cool

This means a lot coming from you!

I love what I've seen you create... Also, having actually taken the time in digital coloring, I have a deeper respect for your Nemesis Prime piece you posted in GD a while back x.x That must have taken ages with all the detail you had! I just want to say how impressive it was, again.

Also, very flattered that my line art reminds you of that artist :shock:

I'm now watching their page. Those are amazing pieces!!

Thank you so much! :MAXIMAL:

Currently working on Orobus. It's proving a challenge to get him the way I imagined him, but I like his progress so far :lol:

by **Sheba** » Tue Sep 11, 2018 5:13 pm

oooh nice.

Like Bad Wolf on Facebook · by **Bad Wolf** » Sat Oct 29, 2022 3:43 pm

always takes me a bit to find my way back...

Bad Wolf wrote:So it's been forever and a day since i've been active. got a working laptop w/'net access, so i figured, i'd take the opportunity to update "Nem's" character card from where i left all those vorns ago...

(re)presenting Invidia Prima (aka Nemesis Prime)

Credits:
original line art bishoujo optimus prime by Shunya Yamashita
Super Link Black Rodimus Convoy by Transformerland
Background, recolors, blending, image sheering by Bad Wolf

---------------------------------------------------------------------

**update**
Got a few TFSprites generated for the team:

Like steve2275 on Facebook · by **steve2275** » Sun Nov 27, 2022 2:39 pm

hot damn

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Tue Dec 06, 2022 10:04 pm

Going through an old hard drive and came across some portraits of my original HMW team from before the wipe... Mostly just straightforward recolours / head swaps from Dreamwave MTMTE (am I dating myself there?) but I still like these three:

Slow-mo: Hardhead from Dreamwave MTMTE (by Don?)
Callback: Minerva by Joe Ng
Underrun: Cybertronian mode Road Rocket by Guido Guidi

I should really (a) do the rest of the team and (b) learn Blender...

Like Bad Wolf on Facebook · by **Bad Wolf** » Tue Dec 06, 2022 11:16 pm

Glyph wrote:Going through an old hard drive and came across some portraits of my original HMW team from before the wipe... Mostly just straightforward recolours / head swaps from Dreamwave MTMTE (am I dating myself there?) but I still like these three:

I should really (a) do the rest of the team and (b) learn Blender...

very cool. i don't ever remember seeing these from back in the day ;)^