First Person Fan Art
Monday, January 18th, 2010We live in the greatest gaming age that ever was: people can not only plow hours into online entertainment, enjoying every second, they can then show their love by livening up our internet with fantastic fanart on the subject. Even after you filter out the idiots who think a screenshot serves as art (it doesn’t, no matter how many photoshop filters you apply) there are plenty of pictures to decorate your desktop until you connect to your game server.
The doctor will see you now (no matter where you hide)
We start off with some Medic propaganda, which rocks despite endorsing the worst thing you can do on a TF2 server short of being a third spy. Combat Medics are a curse on any color they happen to join but the wartime stylings of JayAxer are worth it. Which is probably why another of his efforts won a prize in the recent Valve competition. That’s right - he made fanart so good the actual original-art-ers made stuff for him in return.
There’s more TF2 server love from NerfNow, a computer game comic which is actually good despite not being Penny Arcade. (Unlike every single gaming comic on the internet but one.)
He’s helping!
At the opposite end of the artistic spectrum we’re exposed to oozing horror by Brandon Duncan.
Upgrading an enemy familiar to anyone who enjoys Doom (or indeed knows anything at all about the history of computerized shooting things), the move from pixels to paints really magnifies the grisly wrongness of the cacodemons. They are indeed awful to Behold, and if you realized that was a joke award yourself a +1 Aura of Hardcore Nerd.
A great combination of subject and style by Mikijima with the Crysis nanosuit’s hyper-advanced muscle bundles working well with brush-stroke art. True, that’s way down on the list of awesome things they normally do, like “throw enemies through corrugated iron walls” and “turn you into a Predator” (to say nothing of the nano-accelerated fun on Crysis servers), but it’s worth a few seconds of appreciation.
Okay, that’s enough posing. Get back to leaping onto rooftops and murdering islands.
Speaking of leaping on roofs and murdering, possibly the cutest Hunter (and Witch) you’ll ever see in Jason Chan’s famous Left4Dead4Kids piece (full size here).
This is the best kind of fanart: a genuinely talented artist taking the chance to create a new riff on something, rather than the endless amateur attempts to draw something people have already seen. He’s taken a few liberties, like dumping one of the guys and leaving out the Smoker, but that’s probably for the best. To draw a long-tongued monster in this playground picture he’d have to be Japanese.
Left 4 Dead 2 servers aren’t without artistic efforts either: this cartoony piece by the accurately-if-nonspecifically-named “NotThePornStar” could be a frame from an animated movie. A movie we’d totally watch because it looks awesome.
We leave you with two final thoughts. The first is that no matter how much you love a game not all fanart is a good idea (as proven by this Unreal Tournament server slave):
The second is that the real skill in fanart is sifting the gold from the trash. Are there any awesome pieces we’ve missed? Let us know!
