Escher Girls showcased this image of Sivir from League of Legends. It’s beautifully rendered, but the foreshortening on her got kinda weird, so I thought I’d do my own take on her. It’s still a bit wonky, (foreshortening is HARD, man,) but at least now she doesn’t look so snake-y.
The strict "anti-porn" filtering taking full effect in the U.K. this month might cause problems for some League of Legends users who haven't called their ISPs to opt out of the screening. It seems the patcher is trying to access a couple of URLs with the letters S and E followed by X in them, and that's enough to get a block.
Found a really good forum post on Sivir's new splash a while back and thought I'd post some of the parts that interested me. Definitely read the whole thread if you're interested and have the time, esp the Riot posts.
An Artist's Take On Sivir's Splash:
...If you notice, the most significant points of contrast in the splash are around Sivir's hand, beneath her chest, and behind her leg. A viewer will typically always look at the areas with the most contrast. It's no problem that she's backlit, many LoL splashes have had character's backlit, but they have been more successful. The problem here is that these areas do not lead the viewer's eye toward Sivir's face, which is perhaps the most important part of each character's identity. They lead the eye away. Additionally, even though the dark lighting on the face might be correct, it is so dark and lacking contrast that in addition to the eye being led away from it in the first place, it isn't attractive for the viewer and not a good area for the eye to rest.
You can see this more plainly here:
I think this pretty much gets at why the new Sivir splash was such a disappointment for me. The thing I loved about her old splash was her pose, and while the composition in her old splash was boring and emphasized her cleavage more than her face, at least it didn't detract from anything. Her current splash reminds me of the Spectacular Sivir splash, which I loathe because her pose looks like she's about to take a dump. But it's difficult to explain my immediate dislike of the new splash because, as a different poster said:
The art is mechanically well done in that the image is high-quality with much attention to detail and well drawn... However, there really is no reason for her to be in the pose she's in. It's intended to be in an action pose, but she looks like an awkward flamingo... when I first saw this picture it took me awhile to analyze the image and figure out what pose she was in and where/what everything was on and near her body. A successful splash art should get its message across with little to know analyzation needed...
Of course, then some Riot employee comments to say that "the pose is a very deliberate style choice" but thanks for the lighting advice, which is frankly idiotic, because if Sivir wasn't bent at a complete right angle, she'd make a much more fluid and dynamic shape than she currently is without any fussing with the background lighting. Deliberate exaggeration can be a valid style choice, but exaggerating an action pose to the point where audiences can't tell what's happening in the picture is a bad deliberate style choice.
I mean, the Snowstorm Sivir splash, which is also foreshortened all to hell, shows Sivir in a way more dynamic and impressive pose:
... being as it isn't immediately obvious that she's about to faceplant into the ground. Although she should get to L.L. Bean and buy real winter clothes, stat! This is what I expected the new classic splash to look like: unnecessarily visible boobs, major foreshortening on her arms and legs, chakram flying at the viewer's face, the same swivelspine problems Lux & Karma have, & generic animu face. Which, by League standards, is pretty damn good, or at least not disappointingly awful.
Instead they picked an image where her distinctive & incredibly cool weapon is obscured, there's no decent focal point for the viewer's eyes, and she looks like a paper doll that's been crumpled up in someone's fist-- plus cropping the splash to fit a vertical frame means letting Sivir's rear end run off the frame- which, depending upon the champ to the right of her, can get rather lewd. Not great to let that happen with a champ's default skin. :P
So yeah.. I really miss Sivir's previous classic splash. It wasn't as technically impressive, but it got the fundamentals right.
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