Dammit, closed firefox by accident and lost me reply..
Um.. didn't have anything super important typed up yet but lost my multi-reply.
But I want to tell ASH - I like suggestions, keep 'em coming. I'm more a craftsman than an artist, my creativity isn't limitless and it's fickle. I'm looking for suggestions with a universal appeal though, ones that won't have any trouble selling out the 20 to 50 copies made. Why I took your more specific suggestion and would like to go with a more broad "middle astern" design. There are some really beutiful designs from your part of the world, if I can capture that essence it would make an awesome LE. Same idea as a Celtic LE or a Viking LE or an Eastern LE. Celtic will be easy for me as I did that type of design work for a good number of years. I have a few ideas for a Viking style one. For "Eastern" I was thinking a teal or turquoise color with a koi fish on it, probably some other things. That one's hard though for me - Chinese, Japanese, Korean.. all very different styles and it might look silly to mix them, but at the same time don't really want to single one out. Not to mention all the other countries in that area that I'm not as familiar with the designs of. Celtic and Viking styles both cover several countries. Middle eastern design would have some of the same problems, culture is different from country to country and group to group even in the same country in the middle east, and India is like a world in and of itself. And doing an "Africa" style one would be just impossible. Americans tend to lump the whole continent together, even Americans of African decent, but there are enormous differences there too. So yeah.. better probably to just pick a country/ethnic group and try to make it cohesive. But it still needs to have a broad appeal to the average western market.
The Hell Raiser came about so quickly because Shaitaan talked to Faceless, Faceless liked the idea. We had a vape meet a couple days after that and Shai and I spent about an hour talking about the design and drawing up sketches. I already had a pretty clear idea of where the design was going when I sat down at my computer to draw the graphics.
So anyway.. Ideas, yes, give them to me. In the thread is fine, or PMs.. I don't care. Post images/links to designs that you like and think are in the style that you want. It's crazy expensive to do 1 piece customs, but if you have an idea that 20+ people would love then it'll probably get made eventually.
I asked you to post images of designs that are of your country/area/culture ASH, please post them so I can get an idea of nice ways to make a themed iHybrid. You can do much better than I can with a Google search. I know your area has beautiful art that would make a universally appealing design, just my American mind can't differentiate between all the different groups over there 'cause I've never been there. Chinese and Indian culture are prevalent in the USA, I got those down.. Japan and Korea I've been to, no problem.. I am of European descent, I got a pretty good grasp of the different cultural groups there. Egyption, Incan, those are all over our history books, easy.. Mexican wouldn't be hard. The rest of central/south America and Africa would be harder for me. Canada would be nearly impossible being so similar to the US. Mediterranean Italy/Greece/etc wouldn't be too hard for me. The "middle east" would be harder unless I do something just generic.. and Americans wouldn't know the difference but you would, ASH.. so feed me designs. =)