Postby Godly Paladin » Wed Sep 28, 2005 4:47 pm
First of all, I want to thank each one of you for expressing interest in this and volunteering! I had been afraid there wouldn’t be any takers at all, but I’m very pleased to be proven wrong. I looked over the links each of you provided, and I found that I liked different aspects of what I saw. Therefore I thought that we might hold auditions, so to speak.
I’m going to relate the layout I’m looking for and the descriptions of the various elements, and I’d like you to come up with design sketches, etcetera, using what I’ve provided as well as your own imagination. You don’t have to spend a bunch of time doing anything super-refined or even a single complete sketch. Right now I’m just looking for ‘conceptuals’, if you will.
One final note: please PM me your results, don’t post them here.
1) So here’s the general layout:
The background should just be some sort of starfield with the various space objects: pinwheel galaxies, clouds, etcetera. Imposed over this as a sort of secondary background, though, are the two flat, emerald green eyes of some sort of mecha. They should be menacing and glaring; they shouldn’t be your standard human-type ovals, either. This is a mechanical being, and therefore should be elongated polygons.
The rest of the picture is composed primarily of two men, profiled and facing each other. On the left is the villain, on the right is the hero. They’re obviously looking each other and should have determined, aggressive expressions as they glare across the page. You should be able to see just their heads and a bit of their shoulders. In between them is another mech, which should be about as tall as the character’s heads.
2) Here’s the description of the hero on the right:
Mid-twenties
Thick, navy blue sweater underneath a lighter blue flight jacket.
Matching flight pants (jumpsuit trousers).
Choppy brown hair w/Japanese-style red headband.
Black, fingerless gloves.
Slightly Asian in race.
This guy is a mercenary, and therefore should have a certain ‘toughness’ about him. Not a baby-face, but he isn’t all slashed up and scarred, either. Should have a relatively clean-cut and composed appearance. Muscular but not an Arnold clone. Average physical structure, probably on the wiry side.
3) Here’s the description of the mech that will be in the center, as described by an excerpt from the book:
[I]“It was approximately 90 feet tall, with proportions and features equivalent to a man in the prime of his life: long-limbed, broad-shouldered, deep in the chest, and thick set in structure. Around its ankles, hips, shoulders, and knees were thick armor assemblies that further exaggerated its characteristics. Set into the back of the machine were two massive engines with wide afterburner flares and combustion release valve, giving the impression of a backpack.
Even its head was human in appearance. Two panels crossed from ear to nose on either side of the machine’s face in the nature of eyes; antennae swept back from the sides of its head like long, elfin ears; and cooling ports in the face were arranged in place of a nose.
But one feature of the machine totally shattered the illusion of humanity: a set of wings, long and graceful, that extended to either side in a breathtakingly huge wingspan. From a distance they resembled the white wings of a gull or an eagle, but up close hundreds of aerodynamic channels and thruster ports were visible, set into the metal framing.
It didn’t look so much like a man as…an angel.
There was one last element to the vision, though, that yet again changed the impression. In either hand of the mechanical creature was a slender yet aggressive-looking weapon. The cold metal frame of the guns narrowed from a wide shoulder braces to skeletal shock absorption modules to ruthlessly soulless muzzles at the front that exuded a constant half-glow, indicative of an incredible energy that idled inside them.
Maybe not an angel. More like a demon.
Or an Angel of Death.â€