Shipbucket

Over a year ago it emerged that some works in the Archive are corrupted in terms of stray pixels, non-black outlines etc. things that ought not happen. I've started a review of SB-scale archive contents (approx. 10000 files), which I finished some weeks ago and now want to share some thoughts.

First of all, I want to express as clearly as possible, that nothing written below is meant to shame anybody in particular or to denigrate their efforts in creating Shipbucket content. EVERYBODY did something wrong with some drawing at some point, so there's no room for "I'm better than you" gloating here. Most diligent ones did that for the last time long ago, some still keep doing "some things wrong", and distinction between those two extremes is NOT going along the lines of "experienced long-term members" vs. "noobs". (unfortunately)

There are three main things that were subject of my review: artifacts, black contours and mis-coloring/anti-aliasing+related matters.
In first two areas I attempted to fix these things, unless the drawing in question was extremely messed-up, in which cases these works are marked as corrupted in the bottom-right corner, just over the Shipbucket watermark. In the third area, some errors were fixed, some were marked as corrupted, but some were just left as they are - it will be described more in detail below.

1) Artifacts are meant as dots, usually not visible at a glance, in random shades that are present at various places (most commonly on background, but sometimes they happen to be also on the ships themselves) and which don't actually represent anything that should be legitimately present on the picture.
(below are some samples, deliberately over-sized to avoid showing credits)


Most of these, I believe are result of insufficient clean-up of base drawing, but (as has been discussed on Discord some time ago), some (modern) graphic editors tend to make artifacts on their own in certain circumstances, for example by creating a artifacted "shadow" of the actual drawing 1-pixel to the side.

My advice would be - besides drawing in "false colors" (some arbitrarily chosen, highly-contrasting shades that are completely different from the final colors of the complete drawing) to save the "base drawing" (the one which is used for tracing) in 16-color mode before actual drawing (which then could be, of course, done in multi-color mode) - even if you're using layers. That way all those invisible pixels are automatically "downgraded" to white (or "upgraded" to clearly visible grey) and are no longer an issue, like on the sample below (multi-color base drawing on the left, 16-color base on the right):


2) Non-black contours are something that needs to be avoided in Shipbucket style by its very nature. Occurence of non-black contours on drawings in the archive come from two main sources:
a) Old parts from the archive, that were not outlined in "proper" black and which were later used in good faith by other users. In fact, for a significant number of SB Artists their "guilt" when it comes to problems reviewed here was limited to such good faith. I believe, that since the problem has been raised last year, the Parts Archive was checked for such issues and an effort was made to fix them. Still, remember to check parts you're going to use, just in case.
b) Simple (and sad) sloppines, keeping lines from the base drawing (without checking if they were genuinely black in the first place) or tricks played by some (modern) graphic editors that tend (besides creating artifacts) to alter color values in certain conditions.


3) Mis-coloring etc. is more complicated issue. Unfortunately, quite often artists do not bother to check if colors they used on the ship they draw match the ones on parts they took from the sheets, therefore many drawings got such mis-matches. Even worse, in number of cases the colors applied by artists on parts drawn entirely by them don't match throughout the ship (for example - hull is in one set of shades, gun turrets in another, superstructure in third and funnels and masts in fourth, even though all of them are supposed to be, for example, dark grey). In most extreme cases, sections of a given part were in one shade and other sections - for no reason - in another...
Sometimes I fixed such matters (if it was small and easy), sometimes (esp. if such mismatch was reasonably consistent) just left it as is, and in some cases I just had no choice but to mark the drawing as corrupted.

For such issues, I STRONGLY recommend use of false colors during the drawing process.

Another, related matter is problem of anti-aliasing and gradients in ship names (on hulls and superstructures), logos, flags, emblems etc. In some (small) cases I fixed it, but for the most part I had to just leave it.


I wish to urge You all to check Your works for such issues before posting it. It's not merely a courtesy to post a "clean" drawing, but a requirement of style.

P.S. I'm fully aware that similar issues are present in FD-scale archive, but I'm afraid I can't commit another year of my life to review that part of archive. I'll try to check them bit by bit, but not as such consistent effort. Still, I wish to make all of you aware that you need to be careful with posting "clean" works there as well.