iCE 9812 - score: 7.5 out of 10

God Among Lice:
Darkmage's "Summoning" has a wonderful sculptural feel to it. There's something about it that makes it seem more a creation of the hands than of the tools. Unlike most renderings, the depth and the shapes seem less obviously defined here. The main sculpture in the foreground isn't made up of continuous tones of light and shadow, but separate areas of distinct shades subtly graduated, more like the work of a painter's brush than an algorithm. I think it is the atmospherics which help to flatten the scene, and focus our attention more on these distinct flat areas of the objects and their relation within this fine 2-dimensional composition. 3D artists should keep this in mind.. that their finished product needs to be placed within a 2-dimensional picture plane, and composed accordingly.

Hfaze has some fresh-looking watercolor toon/anime pics. Nice to see something besides airbrushing for once. (Now seeing something besides toons/anime - that's a different story). Maybe you could tone down the texture a little, though? When I see these watercolors it makes me think they've been painted on Quilted Northern toilet paper.

I wish my system wasn't so outdated and I could have seen Jamie McCarter's MOV file. His still image characters seem like they'd be much more at home bouncing around in an animation than as still pictures. I feel like I'm just looking at documentation of something else he's done. It's horribly unsatisfying. So in the future I'll fix my system up to view anything imaginable and hope that ice decides not to release more animation stills. Maybe you guys could start releasing animations separately from the packs, or in their own archives á la cia? It might encourage more people to release them and you wouldn't have to worry about bloating pack size for those who can't handle the downloads.

I loved the picture by Mantis. An actual creative and original rendering... hard to find these days. A kind of neurotic/worried looking "basket"-case is confronted by a massive creature whose green color and thickness doesn't belong to the thin/pointy/orthogonal and decidedly non-organic landscape. I like the play of horizontal vs vertical vs round, and the depth of field effect.

Some more quality stuff from Necro in this pack, you should know what to expect. One thing though, I'd like to see his images saved at highest quality jpeg, since often the detail in his work goes down to the pixel level. I feel like I'm missing out when I zoom in and see shitty jpeg halos.

Some of sq2's stuff shouldn't be seen in an ice pack. That RNP logo looked like it might have been created by some warez group's art dep't. Xten's logo/design work was nice, especially the (presumably) vector-drawn Absolut ad. Root88's stuff seemed a little rushed or unfinished. Cyberise has a sweet gigerish style going on. It seems like it might have more character than Borian's pictures did, though not the compositional completeness of a scene that his usually had.

A very viewable pack this month from ice overall, though I don't think it carried the punch that last month's had.

score: 7.5

Mongi:
As we still lack interested reviewers, I have to continue review iCE, we don't have any choice if we want iCE reviewed at all. After a couple of months of outstanding packs, this one isn't up to the previous packs, but still it's good.

Cyberise is making an appearance again and blows us away with a genuinly appalling alien. The level of detail is awesome, the bubbles, "freckles", scars, stitches, everything! (If you look closely there's "ice" and "insane" tattooed above and below her left eye.)

Darkmage brings us another dark movie-like image. The atmosphere is great and the shadows realistic, not forgetting dropshadows and stuff as many other artists do.

Hfaze's work always keep high quality. The rendered image looks really nice with the lights and all. The x'mas pics are hilarious! God I hate that snowman =) The technique used to emulate watercolor is fascinating. Have a look at the tutorial in the tutorials section.

Mantis have rendered another piece, which I think is a classical painting. I haven't done my homework, so I can't recall who it is. The idea of rendering old paintings in 3D is really awesome. Or it just might be original work.

Squidge brings us loads of logos this month. Although keeping a high quality and great design, the logos are not as original as we would expect from Squidge. The only logo that really caught my eye was sq2-sq1.jpg.

Oldschool ansi artists Leonardo (not to be mistaken for DaVinci) has really shown he knows how to paint hirez too, which much attention to detail. The Necro has an almost demoscene style in his work, which means pretty damn special. It shows he was really fond if Fuel when it existed =)

PS. Some notes on my own pics. The hirez.org promo needed more work, but I really like the iCE promo. DS.

score: 7.5