Tadd Mencer

Artist. Author. Musician. Husband. Father. Christian. All around good guy.

this final earth - Character Test

Some of you may know I’m working on a graphic novel with a friend of mine, Todd Morris. We’re hoping to start  the story soon (like, this summer) and we’ve been working on the creature design. Last night, in a fit of insanity, I started working on a human character. This is what I ended up with.

charactertest.jpg

How I did it:

Creative a male in Poser 7. Make the pose and everything through there. Exported the rendered image as a TIF and imported it into Photoshop CS3.

In CS3 I copied areas of his body that would have the clothes. The legs and pelvis for his pants, torso and arms for a jacket and his feet for shoes. I desaturated these and started using the Liquefy tool to move the pieces around to make look like clothing. Then I started adding a few details to the jacket like the stripes and the zipper.

I started on the hair using two shades of brown and a 1px brush. The Wacom Graphire2 worked wonders and I just softly flowed his hair in a winded direction.

The glowing power hand I just make a soft circle, used the smudge tool and then motion blur. The sparks are a seperate brush that I painted and then added a glow to.

TADA! Here there it is!

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4 Comments


  1. tony (54 comments)

    nice, design.

    everyone needs a critic, so……..top half looks good.
    but the pants and shoes need to be touch up a little. sorry if that was too harsh.



  2. Tadd (79 comments)

    @tony: Yeah I notice new things that suck about it every time I look. It was a test to see what I could do in as little time as possible. Since I’d honestly like at least one page for the graphic novel released online a week I really don’t want to spend 6 hours a day to get a few characters done. Which, if I do it this way it will very much take most of my free time if not all to get pages done. Which I don’t want.



  3. tony (54 comments)

    agree, and when your project is done then you can come back and polish up.



  4. Tadd (79 comments)

    @tony: Well I’m hoping that when I get to the point that I can say the project is done, or at least the style is where I want it then I won’t HAVE to come back and fix anything. It will be what I like - regardless of what anyone else says, ya know?

    I do, very much, appreciate the critique though. Especially at this point. Gives me knowledge on what I need to fix!


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