Red Post Collection: Diana vs Leona Drawing, Note on Urgot, Ohmikegoodness is Soraka, and more!

Diana vs Leona
Over on the forums, a summoner has created a thread polling other summoners on who they prefer - Leona or Diana.

Naturally, this discussion of his armored ladies has succesfull reeled in IronStylus, who commented on Diana's current lead.

"This is interesting to me. There seem to be a lot of people voting on the side of Diana. Why is that? 

We had an interesting discussion back in the day during her creation. Volty, Runaan and myself pitched the idea that inherently, Diana was a good person, but a very tragic victim of her culture's attitudes. We described her situation as one where she would have been chastised for her belief in something counter to what was predominantly believed in her culture. We felt that we could identify with this sort of situation. We felt most everyone, especially those who are attracted to games, the media we like, etc, would find this idea resonant. We ourselves were not terribly "mainstream" in our childhood. We felt as though others could identify with this idea.. Feeling something different than the people around you, but only experiencing derision.

It was a simple concept, but some didn't really think it would have traction for people to identify with. 

We also pretty much drew.. and I'll say this as delicately as I can.. pretty straight comparisons to strict orthodoxy suppressing sentiments, opinions, or knowledge, that didn't jive with said orthodozy's prerogatives. There was sort of a Galileo thing we were drawing inspiration from. Someone convinced they know a truth but are ganged up upon by an established order. We felt this was resonant as well, and was a timeless theme.

I'm very interested that people do seem to find familiarity and resonance in these themes. It's something we felt would speak to people. I'm glad it has"

This discussion sparked IronStylus to whip up an awesome sketch of Leona and Diana.

He also shared the image over on reddit , saying:

"Hey guys! I was restless last night and did a drawering. It got some upboats on GD and some retweets so I thought you might like to see! Do anything you like with it! Well.. within good taste ;) 

I'm going to touch it up and get a higher rez/wallpaper size up when I can. Until then, hope you like!

UPDATE!
Working on cleaning this thing up, getting it to a higher rez-worthy state. Here's the progress on the Diana side. I'm using a bit of reference this time around. As you can see, It's nothing magic. I'm painting the whole face then just moving it so half is off camera. 

http://i.imgur.com/MKIjYCJ.jpg?1 

My process, at least here, because it's such a simple image, is paint the whole face, but polish one side more. When it's in a good state, I cut off the other half, take the existing layer from the worked-up half, and flip it. I then merge the layers down so that the whole face is updated. It's a real half-assed symmetry system. Photoshop doesn't really have active symmetry, like a program like Sketchbook Pro, so I do the hackish version :P 

What's even more hackish is the color! The color will come after I finish rendering in black and white. I then do a solid layer of (in Diana's case, blue) color and throw that on as a Pin Light layer which makes it look neat and washed out. 

Sooo yeah! Totally not magic. This was a really quick sketch to start off with, and therefore it's going to remain pretty short-cut based til the end ;)"

I'll be sure to toss up his polished version once he puts it up!


Is Urgot in line for changes?
When asked if Urgot is in line for any sort of changes or buffs, ricklessabandon noted:

"aside from the lock-on range indicator i added recently, we don't have any set-in-stone plans for him but he is on 'the list' for analysis, kit adjustments, etc. basically we think he could use some attention, but as others have mentioned he's kind of sitting on a razor's edge right now—we'd like to update him such that we can easily make balance changes for him in the future without everyone holding their breath wondering if the world will collapse. :3

tl;dr - he's on the list. doesn't have a date yet. no other info yet, sorry!"

RiotForScience Still discussing Summoner's Rift Art
Same as he's been doing for the past few days, riotForScience is still discussing Summoner's Rift's aesthetics, responding to various questions and conerns from summoners.

"Quote:

Go back to the original SR concept. It had a lot more vibrant colors and more detail honestly. The harrowing map was amazing. The current map had a graphical update but is very bland is mostly focused on grey and green 

This has been a very deliberate move on our part, based on the gameplay needs of LoL. The idea behind it is that to increase in-game readability our art need to be organized into a visual hierarchy. Our highest saturation colors and starkest contrast is reserved for Champion ability VFX, UI like Health bars occupy the 2nd priority, Champions themselves occupy the 3rd priority for contrast,saturation, and level of detail. The environments are the "4th Read". Additionally we differentiate between in-lane play space and other environment spaces and try to keep the lanes less colorful and a little darker so visual effects and champions really pop against them. This is the type of thing we are likely to be doing more of in the future.

That being said, we want to preserve the flavor of LoL. We just also need to balance it against design considerations."

He also mentioned

"Quote:

I hope I am not too far off subject, but I would love to see championship logos and LCS Team Logos in the endzones. Maybe only visible to viewers? Might not be the right thread, but in just in case it is....

Oh, that is a great idea! In the context of E-sports that would be really helpful for clarifying which team is which if you just jump in to spectate a random game. Maybe the Nexus could be a new object that represents the team logo... or all the turrets are themed to their respective teams. That would be really cool! I have no idea if we will do that, but I really like the idea."

Ohmikegoodness is also Soraka
Ohmikegoodness has returned with another animation reference ( that is a video to build the in game animation off of ) , this time showing off the dance for Soraka!

"Happy Friday Summoners!

Here is a little video we used for Soraka's dance!

We wanted to have some sort of banana reference in her animation kit somewhere, so we chose to loosely base her on a dance we saw in a banana commercial! Maybe you guys can find it? ;D

Another possible dance was the "peanut butter jelly" dance... we actually have it animated, but it didn't have the same charm as a 3 frame sprite. It just looked awkward! I hope you enjoy!

*animators have to be comfortable moving around like a lady >_<"