You could say “I’d rather you didn’t post it because you didn’t ask permission”,
and then I wouldn’t be able to publish it because I’d be bound by my word.
(Bear in mind the only photo I had to go by was the one on the forum with your chin hiding behind the Pokitto magazine volume 1.)
And here’s a selection of my preferred skeletons:
great! Reminds me of someone…
Sent @Pharap a PM with a photo of me and will await the results.
One thought I had for the review section is a brief, “Meet the Reviewers” portion that I’ve seen on occasion in some magazines. It’s usually like a very short interview with some basic questions related to gaming in general with a final question on other interests.
My thought was something like this:
Score wise I always kind of preferred the out of 5 for these reasons:
Isn’t that skeleton from a cartoon? Pretty sure I saw him somewhere on TV.
@RagingR0nin you should send a picture to @Pharap for the portrait ( I leave that to you since you might not like me picking one for you 
)
I find that rating too harsh, even more for Homebrew games like what we do. Just my opinion though.
Almost reminds me of Grim adventures of Billy and mandy
This is definitely true. As I’m going through and playing a bunch of games and giving a quick 2-3 sentence review I’m keeping in mind the target audience (usually the developer) as well as the overall budget of these games (which looks to be an average of $15 USD depending on how much coffee was needed).
Most of what I work on is just done to share something decent for free with online friends. And according to my wife, I am giving way too much of my time lol. So harsh review are harder to take in that setting 
so a decent margin for rating is welcome I think. So more chances for nuances in reviews if out of 10. But then critique isn’t always easy to deal with but does help people to get better when used correctly.
Unfortunately everyone will have to wait until I can get some feedback on image dimensions.
I don’t mind doing practice runs when I have free time,
but I don’t want to put in effort only to find out I’ve made the images too small.
Seems like a good idea to me.
I agree. 5 just isn’t subtle enough unless you allow going into decimals (e.g. 3.7),
but at that point you may as well go out of 50 or out of 100.
The robe on the two in the top left is indeed the same one Grim wears.
To find a suitable style I looked at various different illustrated skeletons including…
Note that I specifically did not look for Sans from Undertale or Jack Skellington from the Nightmare Before Christmas because those are very much not the style I was aiming for.
Grim’s a very good incarnation of the grim reaper:
He’s expressive, iconic and an interesting character in his own right.
(Also, all the fanart done in drastically different art styles is both amusing and useful.)
But he also has features I wanted to stay away from (e.g. square jaw, eyebrows) and some I decided I didn’t like the look of (e.g. cheekbones, nose hole, square fingers, three fingers),
hence the skull is quite different (based more on my icon/logo).
His robe is particularly nice though,
I couldn’t resist ripping that off directly (for the sake of a practice run).
I doubt I’ll be able to come up with a better replacement.
(Maybe I’ll ‘borrow’ a robe from an Elder Scrolls game and see who notices. :P)
You nailed it. I instantly thought that was what it was. Well done 
Is there someone in particular in charge of the magazine’s layout?
I don’t mean to be pushy, but I’m pretty much unable to do anything worthwhile until I get an answer about what size the portraits should be.
(I could sit around doodling, but that feels pretty aimless.)
One article I read on making good programmer art recommended drawing at 10x the final resolution (so a 32x32 sprite would start as a 320x320 image). I’m wondering if you might be able to start with a large image that can later be cropped, scaled, and smoothed out once an exact size is known.
Theoretically I could even produce a vector image (e.g. .svg) that could be resized to any scale,
but that would take a lot more effort than producing a normal image.
I’d rather start with a known intended size because that makes it easier to know how big to draw the initial image, whether it has to be rescaled as part of the digital tracing & colouring process, and if so then by how much.
At the very least I need to know the aspect ratio.
I don’t want to go drawing portraits in a 3:4 ratio only to find out they’re supposed to be going in a 1:2 box, that would mean a lot of wasted space and would probably look quite odd to say the least.
Do not worry about that. I can vectorize images much more easily than you think. Its a piece of cake.
Was about to say the same thing, Illustrator can pretty much vectorise it by itself if needed.
Here’s a quick and dirty vectorized example showing it at different dimensions.
JonneTest2.pdf (336.6 KB)
What’s even more fun this way is that you can easily add effects and change colours this way too.
Honestly, I think that actually looks worse than the original,
both the wobbly outlines and the shading effects.
The hair highlights aren’t so bad, but the rest just looks odd to me.
I tried to upload the .svg that GIMP spits out,
but the forum’s rejecting it so I’ll have to host it here as a gist.
(JVx1.svg is what GIMP spits out, the rest are mostly the same file, but with the decimal point moved along to effectively scale the image up.)
Aside from some of the lines not touching when they should and the obvious lack of colour, I think this looks better.
The former is seemingly easy to fix in Inkscape (which I have attempted here).
(I say ‘seemingly’ because SVGs (in general) have a habit of doing strange things after scaling them beyond a certain range unless the values are chosen very carefully.)
Adding colour seems to be more difficult, but perhaps that’s partly because I don’t have much experience with Inkscape.
At any rate, I much prefer being able to just do raster graphics because I know where I stand and what effects I can manage.
Assuming you mean Adobe Illustrator, I simply can’t afford it.
Especially now they’ve switched to a subscription model.
You are probably right, the point was to show that it can easily be vectorized and would be easy to modify if needed.
The intention never was to make it better in any way. And since Jonne isn’t a reviewer, it would probably not even be used
You don’t need to afford anything. Others could do it for you if needed.
Which you undoubtedly did, but you also unintentionally demonstrated that ‘easy’ doesn’t necessarily achieve good results. :P
True I should have taken more then a minute to make the example. Lesson learned.
I don’t doubt you would have managed better shading given more time,
but I expect the blobby lines are just an artefact of how Illustrator infers lines,
so I’m doubtful you’d be able to rectify those unless there’s some factor I’m not aware of.
At any rate, this discussion of vectorising doesn’t really help with my immediate problem of what sort of aspect ratio (and possibly dimensions) I should be aiming for.
