character-portrait
Latest
World of WarCrafts: Ollo Ollovious, the Technicolor gnome
World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music, fan fiction and more. Sample the whole spectrum on WoW.com's Arts and Crafts in WoW page. There's knitting together a World of Warcraft-themed scarf or emblazoning a T-shirt with Alliance pride, inviting your game of choice to mosey along hand-in-hand with your hobby of choice -- and then there's oozing WoW-themed personality through every creative pore of your sweating brow. Jay Scullin comes from the second camp. A web designer by day, Scullin is a WoW-centric artist and blogger by night. When the sun goes down at the end of a long day, on comes his work lamp and in comes a flood of rich, color-saturated ideas pouring forth in his computer-generated artwork and a fanfic account of his character's progress through WoW. Scullin originally created this portrait of his beloved gnome mage Ollo Ollovious of Uldaman (US-A) for last year's Blizzard fan art contest. Using Photoshop and Illustrator with a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet, he painstakingly labored over some 12 hours to keep the representation as true as possible to Ollo's in-game demeanor. In yet another character-focused project, he blogs at Legend of Piket, the ongoing tale of his level 76 protection warrior's ascent through Azeroth, Outland and Northrend. Join us after the break for a brief conversation with Scullin about what keeps his creative pot bubbling with Azeroth-influenced projects. %Gallery-99054%
Character Sketch: Call for submissions
In the midst of all this Real ID brouhaha, it's good to be reminded that we sometimes play the World of Warcraft to immerse ourselves in our other identities -- the characters we play. Some of us enter the world of Azeroth to have a grand adventure, leaving our probably awesome but otherwise non-magical real lives for a while to masquerade as dwarves or orcs ... as anything from plate-wearing champions of the Light to felfire-wielding sorcerers in brimstone-stained robes. World of Warcraft is still an MMORPG, after all, and at the heart of it the characters we play are reflections of ourselves, real names or otherwise. Here at WoW.com, we'd like to celebrate these characters -- your characters -- by taking them for a spin. We're looking for submissions of our readers' characters which we'll take and draw. Think of it as a reverse version of World of WarCrafts, where we'll draw your character and throw in a paragraph or two about them, Know Your Lore-style. We'll need your help, of course. We want you to tell us about your favorite character, whether it be your awesome end-game raiding night elf priest or your humble, low-level bank alt in a snazzy tuxedo set. It's up to you. We want you to let us know about your character by shooting us an email at zach@wow.com with your character's name and a few lines describing them. Obviously, we'll need to get them right, so you could either link us to your character's armory or just send us some screenshots we can use as reference. The more detailed your descriptions or pictures, the more justice we'll be able to give to your character, so make sure to give us everything we need. We'll even try our best to get little details in there somewhere, like your favorite non-combat pet if you want it hanging around. In the end, if we get it right, we'll have a WoW.com wallpaper featuring one of your characters every week. In a way, it's a shot at 15 Minutes of Fame without actually having to be anyone famous in real life or having done anything particularly stupendous. You just need to be you -- and your character needs to be, well, just about any character in the World of Warcraft. Over time, we hope to compile a fairly decent gallery of the heroes that you play. Maybe it'll even help our readers get to know each other somewhat. Without, you know, having to tell anyone your real name or anything.
15 Minutes of Fame: Character art inspires Cenarion Circle raider
15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about at 15minutesoffame (at) wowinsider (dot) com.For all the WoW players who sink into Azeroth to escape the travails of the world outside are others who seem set ablaze by the ideas, energy and connections sparked during their gaming. Among the inspired: Aislinana of Cenarion Circle, whose casual interest in assembling a sweet character portrait of a guildmate has morphed into a growing passion, with a growing fan base clamoring for their own portraits.15 Minutes of Fame: Tell us how you got started doing character portraits – because you're not actually a professional artist or long-time hobbyist, are you?Aislinana: Well, we were hanging around in Black Temple after a raid finished up, so I snapped a screen cap of my friend's priest, Kallindril, and said I'd spruce it up in Photoshop. Little did I know that it was going to turn into an obsession for me. I mean, I've always loved taking screenshots. I take them all the time to capture something awesome looking, much like I do with my own digital camera. So I've had an eye for this stuff. I just started to retouch/edit and then eventually started painting in effects in Photoshop.
