Hey Quake 1 fans!

Meet your ol' "friend" Ranger - on a typical, patented dsm-type of halfassed background :-P

And please point out any proportional errors you can find - I have a nasty habit of not discovering them until people with sharp eyes point them out to me. (And I have had a nasty habit of defending my art too, but don't worry, I'll try and be good this time).

Since when did Rangar wear non-retarded armor? :)

His feet look a little small to me, and that left arm looks a little off, but otherwise I think it kicks ass. Not last place! Ding!

Main flaws that i can spot.
. Feet look a little small, could be the angle that they are at.
. Could be the angle that it is set at but his right hand looks a little small
. Could just be me but the teeth look pointy and gnashy.

I was going to put the quality of the shading in the background on the list but i've grown to recognise that as your art style so i'll respect that.

Other than that, i like it. A really cool pose for him. I imagined the perforator would be a bit bigger but i'm sure if it was he wouldn't be hanging like that. With the fall of gameart.com i'd say it's great to see a revival of quake art. Keep up the good work.

TSTuke said:

Main flaws that i can spot.
. Feet look a little small, could be the angle that they are at.
. Could be the angle that it is set at but his right hand looks a little small
. Could just be me but the teeth look pointy and gnashy.

I was going to put the quality of the shading in the background on the list but i've grown to recognise that as your art style so i'll respect that.

Other than that, i like it. A really cool pose for him. I imagined the perforator would be a bit bigger but i'm sure if it was he wouldn't be hanging like that. With the fall of gameart.com i'd say it's great to see a revival of quake art. Keep up the good work.

Heh, thank [higher power] that I didn't accept the original feet I gave him - they were even smaller.
You could be right about the feet - I wasn't even sure if they were the right size myself when I put it up.
Hmm, looking at it again, I think you're right, they're too short.

The arms are definitely also unbalanced - I constantly redid both arms trying to get them right, but this is apparently one of these drawings where it's impossible for me to make both limbs the right size, because now that the pic is scanned, I can definitely see a difference. Damn.

As for the teeth, they were intended to be pointy and gnashy all along - I thoroughly checked the Q3A model and his teeth seemed rather 'special' to my eyes. Also, I was considering his Q3A profile which said that "his experience has left him more alien than human".
But I will say that I'm not sure the teeth turned out *quite* like I wanted them to be.

I'll also say that I was never satisfied with that perforator - it looks too much like my version of the chaingun the way I'd draw it three years ago - I might have intended for it to look small and compact though, it's one of these things with which I'm uncertain about how to do them.
Oh yeah, and Ranger is actually not hanging from the beam on this drawing - I intended for him to be in the middle of dropping down from the beam - sorta like, he's just been standing/trying to hold his balance on the beam and has just bent down and he's sorta dropping down, still with one arm wrapped a bit around the beam if you understand what I mean.

Otherwise, if he were hanging, I would feel that it would be a bit too unrealistic, considering that he doesn't seem to have a firm grip around the metal beam.

Since when did Rangar wear non-retarded armor? :)

Since I decided to reinterpret him with non-retarded armour ;-)

Hmm. Not your best work. Lacks solid structure. On a cute note, it looks like he fell funny and popped his arm out of his shoulder and is going "URgh.. oh that ain't going back in on it's own.... little help?'

Indeed the left arm looks a bit weird... not bad... just weird.
Also, I think you could add some more shadow being cast from the ranger on the wall. This will make it more 3D and realistic...

It an impressive drawing!

Hang on, is Ranger the Quake Doomguy? Cool!

m0l0t0v said:

Also, I think you could add some more shadow being cast from the ranger on the wall. This will make it more 3D and realistic...

There is no wall - if I had the patience (and interest in walls), you'd have been seeing a cool-looking tiled wall.
The background only serves one purpose: To prevent the beam from seeming out of place.
I hate doing backgrounds, so the best you'll see from me is typically halfassed hallways - but more often, you'll see these kinds of shitty dark "shades" as a background.
I do prefer to avoid doing backgrounds altogether because backgrounds are a total drag to do and kill my own enthusiam in the drawing.

Plus, they give me scores in the negative department.

Hang on, is Ranger the Quake Doomguy? Cool!

What's that supposed to mean? Ranger is the Quake 1 hero - plain and simple. There is no such thing as a "Quake Doomguy".

Woa, very nice. Good details and shading.
Crits: His right foot is fuxored. We are getting too much of a side view, it should be a front/bottom view, not a three-quarter bottom view. They look too small as well.
His left arm look very uncomfortable, I don't think you could hold your arm at that angle without popping somthing.
Other than that there is nothing major to complain about. Great piece!

I dunno.. it looks wierd to me. The entire upper body looks like it's melting, And the arm looks broken, or popped very far out of it's socket, and the legs seems to be shrinking in various spots. Minor proportional problems. IMHO.

Lost Soul said:

I dunno.. it looks wierd to me. The entire upper body looks like it's melting, And the arm looks broken, or popped very far out of it's socket, and the legs seems to be shrinking in various spots. Minor proportional problems. IMHO.

You're gonna elaborate on a few areas of your criticism.
Like, where exactly does it look like his upper body is melted? His armour?
Bear in mind, that he's wearing an armour vest composed of some sort of rough cheramics material - not metal.
Underneath it, he's wearing...I dunno..probably some vest made of thin clothing and when you stretch your clothing, it becomes full of 'ripples'.
The arm issue can be explained as me not yet being fully acquanted with how you do the backside of an arm - I probably added too many misleading details. It may also just be a perspective issue with the beam.

You gotta have to elaborate on the legs - shrinking? Wtf?

dsm said:

You're gonna elaborate on a few areas of your criticism...

Since when do you order people around? ;P

C'mon.. a please would be nice.

When I said melting, I didn't mean in a sense of drawn detail melting. I know what armor looks like. I meant the drawing itself. The structure on this character is really not strong, so the details and joints/muscles/features are not anchored on anything solid, thus creating the effect of a badly damaged liquifying T-1000 still pressing on, rather than the quakeguy.

The shrinking legs are caused by the slightly botched perspective on the leg closest to us. It is not foreshortened properly, thus looks tiny, mishapen, and proportionally wrong. Also he has no solid built pelvis which adds to my 'melting' crit, You cant tell where his midsection ends, and his hips begin, it also looks like he has no hips because of this. Masses are important, proportions and construction ALWAYS come before detail.

This is just what I see.

dsm said:

You're gonna elaborate on a few areas of your criticism.

do you mean "You're gonna have to elaborate"?

Heh. Nice. I just beat Quake 1 for the first time last night, without cheats.

Lost Soul said:

When I said melting, I didn't mean in a sense of drawn detail melting. I know what armor looks like. I meant the drawing itself. The structure on this character is really not strong, so the details and joints/muscles/features are not anchored on anything solid, thus creating the effect of a badly damaged liquifying T-1000 still pressing on, rather than the quakeguy.

The shrinking legs are caused by the slightly botched perspective on the leg closest to us. It is not foreshortened properly, thus looks tiny, mishapen, and proportionally wrong. Also he has no solid built pelvis which adds to my 'melting' crit, You cant tell where his midsection ends, and his hips begin, it also looks like he has no hips because of this. Masses are important, proportions and construction ALWAYS come before detail.

This is just what I see.

Thanks, that was better :-)
You'll have to understand that I prefer my criticism as detailed as possible - if there is one thing I can't stand it's when people just seem to be implying stuff like "It looks like shit because the legs look weird" - a comment like that or similar to that is utterly useless, because it only serves to confuse the artist, making him think "yeah, whatever you say..." without giving him/her any clear help on how (s)he could possibly improve on the drawing or future drawings.

Just "slagging off" people's art is not constructive criticism - it's important that you understand that, so that when you do comment on flaws, make sure that you point out exactly what's wrong.

Yeah, his torso seems a bit long too. It's still better than a good many of mine. ;)

Well, I'm no expert of art, but it looks pretty damn cool to me.
At first I thought the gun barrels seemed a bit misshapen, as if the gun had been banged against something and dented, but looking closer it seems they're intended to be that way... the barrels aren't perfectly round but have a groove in them.
I also notice that he's clean-shaven, and I always thought of him as having some stubble on his face like he hadn't had a shave in a day or two... that's just my interpretation of how the game's graphics looked to me, yours is probably just different.

Draconio said:

Well, I'm no expert of art, but it looks pretty damn cool to me.
At first I thought the gun barrels seemed a bit misshapen, as if the gun had been banged against something and dented, but looking closer it seems they're intended to be that way... the barrels aren't perfectly round but have a groove in them.
I also notice that he's clean-shaven, and I always thought of him as having some stubble on his face like he hadn't had a shave in a day or two... that's just my interpretation of how the game's graphics looked to me, yours is probably just different.

Where to start...
The barrels are indeed intended to look grungy and.. er..."non-round".
The barrels have a flat side - the rest of them is round. I did this to make them look a little more interesting than your generic round barrel.
Actually, I didn't intend for him to be clean-shaven - problem is that when using pencils, I can't really give him a "gray area" sort of stubby look like the Q3A Ranger model has - I'm just not good enough for that (I wanted to do that originally, but had to give up, because I was worried it would fuck up the shading which can be a very delicate aspect of drawing).
I also considered actually drawing the individual hairs (I could've done that!), but decided against it for some reason.
But yes, I agree that the original Ranger (both the Q1 and Q3A version) is the unshaven kind of hero - I remember thinking that he looked like a stereotype criminal when I first saw his hud face in Quake 1 screenshots.