'Tis the season to pack extra ammo! This is an illustration that I created for a PDF adventure that will be posted online for free download: it is written specifically for the Gutshot Wild West miniatures game, but can easily be adapted to any other miniatures game or RPG. When posted this weekend, it can be downloaded here: http://www.hawgleg.com/2007_contest_winner.asp The plot is simple: Klaus is a kindly old blacksmith who, in his spare time throughout the year, makes toys for the children of his town and the surrounding farms. This year, Cole Black and his goons have decided to cancel the Christmas fun by stealing all the toys from old Klaus. It's kinda like "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" or "Year Without a Santa Claus," but with cowboys and guns. This illustration took me MUCH too long to create, and even then I'm not really happy with it. The base figure is the Toon Santa model with a few props (including the free Daz3D set, Questor's Guns). The background figures are a face-morphed P4 man and the James models (if I recall correctly). The Santa figure was rendered Sketch Style: In order to get the detail I wanted, the render dimensions were set to 3000 pixels wide. This really allowed the render engine to create some nice variations in the stroke widths. After opening the image in Photoshop, I used an Aiptek Graphics Tablet to touch up the figure outline (the eyes, in particular, needed editing). The other two figures were rendered normally and brought into PS where I used the threshold tool to create the stark shadows I wanted (and yes, I lit them from below to make them appear even more menacing). One of the big problems I had was with getting the Klaus figure to contrast with the two thugs in the background. The sketch style render just came out too light. I finally solved this by duplicating the layer and setting the layer blending mode to multiply. This darkened all the lines and made the dominant figure "pop." This was helped by running the two thugs in lighter tints behind him, and this helps increase the sense of depth in an otherwise flat image. By the way, the composition might look a bit tight here, but that's because this illustration needs to fit on a page with a headline and some text, which is why they might look a bit cramped. Oh, and I removed the thug's legs behind Klaus because they were distracting and broke up the composition when the text was present. I admit it looks a bit odd here, but in its final version it actually helps tighten our focus on Klaus. Everything was composited in PS. The brown tint was added for Renderosity -- straight b&w renders tend to look a bit dull online. All in all, it's not too bad. I think I'm on the right track in my goal to create a nice pen & ink style effect that doesn't look like your average Poser render.