[Rokkan]

So, in this uni class, one of our works is to design & print a catalog of anything we'd like. I decided to do a short catalog of Cool Women Characters In Games. I devised my list with certain priorities in mind: Variety - which means representing different kids of women and minorities, but also characters from different ages of gaming and developers, and different characters with different roles as well, as long as they're important to the game. Non-Grossness, being that this industry is mostly dominated by men, both with the devs and the consumers (though the consumer base is arguable seeing as how in different games, genres and platforms we might have a majority of women) it's only natural that we see a lot of gross shit. I'm trying to keep that to a minimum and try to mostly represent the good, non-problematic eggs. And finally, Importance, the character needs to have at least a little bit of popularity and positive or neutral importance, and some choices are here mostly because they are overwhelmingly popular.


Here's the problem though, it's really hard finding official art of a lot of these characters, I was wondering if selectbutton would help me out, linking me to good websites of hi-res artworks and scans of games and stuff. Some of these characters definitely do NOT have good high-res stuff online and i will have to completely redraw their illustrations or do a completely new illustration for them, and since I'll probably only have a short time to do this catalog, I wanna keep the illustration work to a minimum (especially because I'd love to have a lot of time to draw a kickass cover and back to the book!), so help finding good artwork is crucial! (i'd be ETERNALLY THANKFUL if cool artists would also help with illustration, that'd be super rad but i really don't wanna ask for that/rely on it)


Here's the list of characters and how the image search is coming along so far:

http://pastebin.com/hDxKvpCr
(don't mind the order, that's not going to be the final order of the catalog)

I'm pretty set on this list but if you strongly feel I left a cool character out or not considered something important, please feel free to tell me so.

Also, if anyone also wants to help me with this, I'll probably need help writing short descriptions for a lot of those, a lot of these are from games I admittedly never played but only heard a lot & researched online about, I could write all of them myself, as I'm researching a lot about these characters, but it's likely to have some errors.

[Rokkan]

thank you so much Talbain, that site helped me a lot!!

the only ones missing really are Um Jammer Lammy, Kumatora, GlaDOS, Agatha from Pokémon, General Beatrix and Mae from Shining Force

there are some that I have but aren't very good/could do with one or two more good pictures, which are Vanessa from Virtua Fighter, Elaine from Monkey Island, Alyx from Half-Life, Yelena from Deus Ex (got good pictures of her but they're either low-res or with a lot of jpeg artifacts), Medusa from Kid Icarus (there's only one artwork of her i think) and Isabelle from Animal Crossing

[Rokkan]

My Vanessa (Virtua Fighter) pictures are her only high-res render from Virtua Fighter 5 and a sorta low-res render of her from Virtua Fighter 4, I think these are the only pictures that are available of her online.

My Alyx pictures are the ones from your website, which are pretty high-res but she's always "cut" or overshadowed by Gordon Freeman, and this one which is pretty good and I don't think your website has it https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20235127/ALYX1.jpg

My Yelena pictures are basically the ones found in the Deus Ex wiki http://deusex.wikia.com/wiki/Yelena_Fedorova but as you can see, if you zoom in you'll quickly notice they're upscaled and full of jpeg artifacts and stuff, but it's no biggie, i can paint over it and enhance them manually

My Elaine pictures are these two https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20235127/ELAINE1.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20235127/ELAINE2.jpg and the amazingly high-res cover that you have of the first Monkey Island game, the problems are that, as you can see, the first one not only is just a sketch but is also hideously upscaled & full of jpeg artifacts. The second one is a really good picture but I really wish I had a full body one, and in the lucasarts cover art, there's that monkey in front of her. I'm thinking of maybe painting that sketch to make it look like the second picture, maybe. I really wish there was artwork available of her from the first games that weren't in-game pixel-art and her appearance in the first game's cover art.

Isabelle, I can't seem to find anything from her other than these two artworks: http://library.servare.org/picture.php?/3719/category/652 and http://library.servare.org/picture.php?/3703/category/650 there's lots of fanart of her though, I might just ask someone's fanart or draw it myself.

And finally, Medusa from Kid Icarus, I think this is the only available artwork of her online http://library.servare.org/picture.php?/55698/category/3983
Maybe there's some artwork of her in the instruction manual for the Famicom game? I don't know, can't find any.

[Rokkan]

Different poses for Medusa and Isabelle are awesome, if you can find those I'd love them!

[Rokkan]

I can't find artwork of Hibana that's not gross. Her outfit is also super sexualized, so I decided to not put her in. Ibuki was going to replace her as the kunoichi representative, but then I also replaced Ibuki with Makoto because Makoto is so awesome & it's so rare we find a female character like that in fightmans.

luvcraft, that makes me super happy! This book in particular will probably just be for my class but I'm definitely keeping what you said in mind, and will try my best at it!! :)

Oh yeah, also, I forgot to put there, I can't find good hi-res artworks of Akira from Rival Schools. I just found a ton of artworks but they're all very low-res and also very cropped.

[Rokkan]

Toptube: No it's not! It says 4 pictures in perfect condition! I got a bunch of high-quality images of her! Thanks a lot though!

Jigsaw: THANK YOU, that is very high-res and it's also full-body, thank you so much! I can do image editing myself, but I'll let you know in case I need some help!


I might reconsider Hibana and Jill Valentine in, and also consider Heather Mason, Lucia and Joanna Dark, I'll let you folks know!

[Rokkan]

Added Heather Mason, Hibana from Nightshade/Kunoichi, Regina from Dino Crisis and Ellie from Borderlands 2 into the list! Got good high-res pictures of all of them!

[Rokkan]

hey!! sorry for not keeping you guys posted about it, I'm hard at work on it, currently finished 13 pages out of 28 (not counting index, introduction, cover and whatnot, just the character pages), but here's something I finished just now:



wasn't really happy with the few high-res artworks of Alis available, so I decided to redraw the title screen pixel-art of her!

will post more previews soon!

[Rokkan]

[Rokkan]

Mae's finished, coloring Alis now!




Mae is a redraw of this artwork here:

[Rokkan]

Alis Landale finished! And also Kumatora!







Also managed to do some touch-ups on Yelena and make her artwork look nice, high res and non-jpegish, hooray!

[Rokkan]

hi! took me a while to respond because I was actually ashamed that I was a bit behind my planned schedule, so I finished this artwork in the meantime to show you guys:

http://gyazo.com/722b97473274a1556a4299e11565e7b4


Just a handful of pages and cover art and I'll be done with it!

[Rokkan]

Sorry for taking so long, but here's a PDF (not in full printing quality because of filesize restraints, but it's pretty good quality!) of my project! It's all in brazillian portuguese but I'm currently working for a translated english version too, though the text isn't the main attraction here, I feel

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20235127/womeningames_ptbr2.pdf

Enjoy & tell me what you think!

[Rokkan]

I'll finish the english version and let you know! Also, it's the bare minimum I could've done since your website was such a key resource to sooo many images featured there.

[Rokkan]

There are some typos and Lammy's date is totally wrong too ahah. Correcting those in the English version though.

Not just Chie is used twice, Shinobu too. The cover was sort of a last minute thing because my initial plan was to do a drawing of all the characters featured in the book, but I just decided to use the artworks I had downloaded and made already for the catalog to do this. I might do something with the noticeable blankness of the up-left side of the second cover though.

Also I really wanna do little comparisons of the original artworks to how they appear there because I feel like I did a tremendously nice job at making them look sharp and crisp and pop out a lot, and it works especially well printed - the way some artworks were like originally, with low saturation and contrast and in some cases, even a tad blurry, would look totally awful printed.

[Rokkan]

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20235127/womeningames_en.pdf


Bam! Second revision, and in English! More information than in the Portuguese version, typos corrected and stuff! And now you can read it! So please do and let me know what you think, especially regarding the text, let me know if i phrased something weirdly (since English is not my first language), typos and any possible misinformation and stuff.

[Rokkan]

No, it's not your fault - I prefer them in RGB to convert them myself. A lot of the artworks were just kinda gray and lacking contrast and stuff because that's how they were made, but I did some special care to make them more contrasted to pop out more so it looks super good printed! I urge to compare, for instance, Medusa's original artwork to my edit there, or Aveline's artworks to mine so you can see what I mean.