So, uh, I’ve noticed that on challenges some people like to write posts after them talking about all of the various submissions and giving their opinions on them, so I thought I would try my hand at the same. I’m going to try my best to be constructive here, explaining what I like and dislike about the various drawings and how I think the artists could improve their skills in the future. Unfortunately I am super bad at social interaction and find criticizing people easier than praising them, so it may be a very harsh read for which I apologize deeply. I genuinely mean no offense to everyone - even the people here for whom I have no praise and just complaints, please remember that it’s just my personal opinion and therefore exactly as valid to you as you want it to be. If you want to be super proud of your work, go for it!
(I’m going in order of when they were posted, and skipping my entry for the end).
- Edusa’s Army (Mr. Sinny)
This is a very nice and good-looking submission IMVHO, at least from the perspective of the designs of the uniforms and equipment. I know little about the clothes worn during this period IRL but they do look cool, especially the officer on the right with all those folded sections hanging down.
The poses are simple and somewhat repetitive, but I feel like it works well enough in this case, and the shape of the clothes and the detailing on them is very good. The shading is very basic with just 3 tones, but it is applied well and used to the best extent it probably could have been. Some additional shades would have been nice to add detail, especially on the center figure who’s somewhat bare, and on the legs of the leftmost figure which could benefit from the middle tone being used on the right side as to extend the folds, and a darker tone on the left again to extend them.
- Highland Armies of the Unification Wars (1541-1573) (Aiseus)
This entry is also very good. The shading is again quite basic but you’ve made use of the limited shading palette in an excellent manner. The lightsource coming from the top-left (as best as I can tell at least) is unique and pretty cool, and I like the way the highlights have been drawn, and the use of a fourth shade to add fold lines, though to be fair a full on five-shade system with a sixth for deep folds would have probably worked better.
The poses are basic and repetitive, and in this case I feel like it works strongly to the entry’s disadvantage. There’s a lot of empty space between the figures, and even if you moved them closer the outstretched right arms makes it more difficult for the repeated poses for the 2nd and 3rd figure to fit in compared to the previous entry. From a design perspective, again I know little about the clothes from this era but they look visually very interesting. Personally I’m not a massive fan of the 1st and 2nd figures, though the red sash and feathered cap are really awesome. The third figure is better in my opinion, probably mainly thanks to the half-cape which looks really cool.
The choice you made to have a lot of variation in the gender presentation and identity of the figures was great, and I wish more of the entries did that! I also love that you didn’t give the rightmost one the super-thin body shape typical of most female-presenting soldierbucket figures, and that you had the one in heavy armor be female, even though most people would stereotypically make them male.
- Zephyrian Army at War 1970-2020 (El_Snow)
The design and detail work on the uniforms and weapons is excellent, you’ve done an outstanding job there, and the poses are really cool and eye-catching. The dog is a fantastic touch as well, and I absolutely love how dynamic the pose it’s in is.
It’s very disappointing, then, that there’s essentially no shading of note on the drawing. The exposed skin of the humans gets a single dark shade, the dog gets a dark and a highlight shade (why is that inconsistent?), and the uniforms are completely unshaded. This is just… a very weird choice? Adding shading would be utterly trivial - add a new layer, draw over the shaded areas in black, and set the layer opacity to 5% or something similar. If you want highlights, draw the camo in the highlight color to start with, then draw over the neutral tone and shaded sections in two layers on top.
- Uniforms of Stargate Command 1994-2010 (1), SG-1 to SG-10, Atlantis Expedition, Icarus Base (The_Sprinklez/etccommand)
As a massive Stargate fan I absolutely love this. The choice of characters, the poses they’re in, and the detailing on their uniforms and equipment is all excellent. The shading is slightly lackluster but at least you actually have 3-tone shading, unlike some other entries. The arms, legs, and boots on some of the characters look weirdly thin unfortunately, I suspect that might have just been an issue with the images you were tracing not really working when scaled down so far. Other than that though, it’s very good.
Oh, and I like the background! Not many entries included one, so it’s nice to see some diversity here.
- The American-Saderan War 2022-2023 (San Silv)
I like the choice of setting for this, as, uh, problematic as GATE is it is also very cool IMVHO. Your choice to switch the location from Japan to the US is understandable, I wouldn’t personally have done that (there are plenty of US forces in Japan if you wanted to include them) but I can understand why you might want to and I won’t hold that against you. From a design standpoint the clothes and weapons are good, you’re basically pulling from existing real or fictional material but you’ve done a good job translating that into a pixelart drawing.
With that being said, the complete lack of any sort of consistent shading is very weird and massively detrimental to the quality of the drawing, and the light lines on the belt and AK don’t look good in my opinion. I’m also not quite sure why you chose to draw the middle figure with no equipment or weapons. Oh, and you state in the text that there were male and female US soldiers operating beyond the gate, and I presume soldiers of various other ethnic backgrounds would be as well, so I’m not sure why you didn’t draw someone female-presenting or non-white or both for the middle figure, some diversity would go a long way into making it less bland.
- Argentina’s Law Enforcement Agencies (2004-Present) (MattewEx)
The clothes and equipment here are well drawn, if somewhat basic. The shading is painfully inconsistent, with dark shades on both sides of the leftmost figure’s torso but both highlight and dark shades being used everywhere else. The thickness of the shading lines is also weird, and the lack of detail on the uniforms makes them seem rather bland. The poses they’re in are also very basic, and the fact that both the male-presenting figures have very similar large and stocky builds while the sole female-presenting figure is competitively tiny is weird. Statistically I would expect one of the other figures to be of a similar size and build to her, or maybe just slightly larger. Other than that, there isn’t much to say.
- Martian Espatiers 2270-2280 (corp)
I love the concept here, though I suspect it’s been let down by the execution. This submission is still very good, don’t get me wrong, but the low contrast and inconsistent shading (with light sources coming from seemingly every direction, except for on the middle figure which has no shading at all) are a bit odd. I like the designs present, even if they look more like construction equipment than armor, and the (what I presume is a) nuke carried by the middle figure is a nice touch. Oh, and the proportions on the rightmost figure look very weird, unless there’s been significant genetic drift over the centuries I would not expect their hips to be so much wider than the rest of their torso.
- The New Grand Army Post 2017 Reforms (PsychicUmbreon)
This is… an interesting submission to say for sure.
Firstly, this blatantly violates the rules that Kiwi laid out on the discord server, and it also violates some of the rules as stated on the forum. The rules explicitly say three figures must be depicted - here there are only two. In addition, the template can be expanded to fit, but straight-up adding more pages seems like cheating.
With that said, ignoring those issues, this isn't a bad submission. The pose on the right character is very cool, and the uniforms, while bland and uninteresting, are drawn well enough. The complete lack of shading really lets it down though, at the very least I would expect even a token attempt at it on the left figure, but apparently not.
- Forces of Dagor Dagorath AD 41666-41667 (Andrzej1)
This is just straight-up not allowed. I myself initially wanted to forgo black outlines on my entry, and after discussing it Kiwi layed down the law that all entries should have black outlines over everything except hair and perhaps some very small or thin protruding elements. Quite frankly omitting black outlines over exposed skin as I originally wanted to would be grounds for disqualification, and this is just a whole other level entirely.
Now, having said that, it would be unfair not to judge your entry even if it doesn't follow the rules of the challenge. The shading on the leftmost figure is very nice, and I’m even willing to forgive the light-source not being in the top-left, though some more contrast would have really helped IMVHO. However, the shading on the middle figure is lacking a lot, and there is simply none at all on the rightmost figure, which is very disappointing. Likewise, the level of detail and effort put into the lines and general design seems to have decreased slightly from left to right, and none of them are displayed in interesting or eye-catching poses.
- Warriors of the 6th Legion (Maxwell John)
The designs here are pretty interesting, and it's executed pretty solidly. The lack of poses is disappointing though, and the complete lack of any shading whatsoever lets it down massively. There’s not really that much more to say here, beyond that I think it’s a good start but needs more work, especially on shading.
- Armies of the Late American City-State Period (2150-70) (Dick Nixon)
Okay, this is pretty cool. I was wondering how long it would take before someone drew a mech! Or a set of power-armor, in this case. The two normal figures are both drawn excellently, and the poses are just different enough from standing at attention to add a tiny bit of visual interest, though the shading on them is bland and clearly incomplete. The power-armor is well-drawn in principle, but looks very flat and bland, probably due to how much of it is just featureless empty space. Some additional surface detail, and maybe some weathering, would help a lot I think.
- Commanders during the hellenic constitutional crisis Dec ‘83 - Jan’ 84 (Mauser)
Okay, firstly, that title needs work. Hellenic - and probably Constitutional Crisis as well - should be capitalized, and that’s not how you use apostrophes. It should be Dec’ ‘83 - Jan’ ‘84, or if you want it to look better, Dec’ 1983 - Jan’ 1984.
As for the drawings, they look decent enough. The line art is good, though the clothes and equipment are very bland and boring, and while there is 3-tone shading it’s barely visible at all, and they aren't in any interesting poses (except perhaps for the middle and maybe the right figure). The background image is really cool though, it’s nice to see more entries using one.
- The Ubamenid War 5520-5523 (1), Victorious Flock Infantry (Charguizard)
This is just… wow. It’s really good, and possibly the best submission of all of them. The lineart is excellent, the shading is very painfully basic but still somehow better than most of the other entries, and the poses are just amazing. Oh, and the effects! I love the missile firing and the recoilless rifle and rocket exhausts, that’s just great. I don’t really have any criticisms, great job!
(actually, I do have one, which is that the small figure in the background directly flies in the face of when Kiwi explicitly said on the discord server not to do that in submissions, and that all the figures had to be in-scale with each other, but whatever, I’m willing to ignore that given the quality of the drawing)
- Military Zombies of the UN’s Global Security (Kat Tsun)
I’m not gonna lie, I have no idea what’s actually being depicted here (the title and short description seem to raise more questions than they answer), but whatever they are, they’re drawn very well. The shading on the rightmost figure is just a masterclass, and the leftmost figure isn’t bad either. The top… is that a figure? Whatever it is, it’s a bit bland, but still quite cool. The poses do definitely leave something to be desired though, right now they’re pretty uninteresting.
And finally;
- United Federation of Planets, Starfleet Command 2258-2271 (BillKerman1234)
I’m going to try my best here to be objective, but I’m obviously going to be subconsciously biased, so take everything I say with a massive grain of salt (or even an entire salt-shaker).
Shading-wise I think that my entry is the best out of all of them, simply because of the fact it uses five-tone shading to its full potential, but I can see various arguments to the contrary. I didn’t depict much surface detail or folds or stuff like that, and the shades I used were somewhat low-contrast, so I can understand it going either way. From a design standpoint I was obviously working off of existing material for both the clothes, equipment, and characters, but it took a bit of work to translate them into pixelart form. With that being said I definitely wasn’t the best in terms of clothing or equipment (though the transporter enhancer was pretty cool), but I think my characters were better than anyone else's. The fact I was one of very few people to draw non-humans (power armor doesn't count) probably helped in that regard.
Poses wise, again I think I did a pretty good job. Scorpia’s pose was traced from her character sheet, though it took a lot of effort given how degraded the references were when scaled to that size, and Catra and Rogelio were drawn from scratch using various different references. I’m really proud of the pose Rogelio is in, and Catra pointing her phaser right at the screen isn’t bad either. Oh, and I’m also very proud of the subtle but distinct modifications I made to the template. All it’s really missing is a background image to add visual interest, but I never thought to add one until it was too late.
Of course, from a technical level my entry is nonsense and that’s reflected in the polls. That’s fine though, I went into this fully aware I was probably going to score the lowest on the realism front (though looking back some may have actually gone lower) and I accepted that.
Overall, I’d say my entry is one of the best from an artistic standpoint, though maybe not the best,and the fact I was the 3rd highest ranked on drawing quality seems to reflect this. Again, though, I’m probably a bit biased.
There are a few things I’d like to say in general about this challenge. Overall, we got some good entries, some mediocre ones, and some bad ones, as is typical. A lot of the good entries had some cool characteristics to them, but I don’t think any of the entries combined all of the cool characteristics present - there was unfortunately no entry that had a background image, a unique template, well-done 5-tone shading, excellent lineart, good scenic effects, and lots of visual diversity all in one submission. This isn’t super unexpected though, and I think getting a nice wide view of how all of these things can be implemented will benefit all of the artists seeing these submissions in the future.
I also want to point out that in this challenge, we had 15 entries, for a total of 44 figures (not 45, because PsychicUmbreon’s entry was missing one). Of those 44 figures:
- 18 were white humans and presented male
- 4 were non-white humans and presented male
- 6 were white humans and presented female
- 0!!! were non-white humans who presented female
- 6 were humans of an ambiguous ethnicity and presentation
- 1 was non-human and presented male
- 3 were non-human and presented female
- 6 were non-humans of an ambiguous ethnicity and presentation
This is… concerning. All of these submissions depicted forces from various AU’s, which means there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for the numbers being this highly skewed. You, as the author of an AU, have the ability to depict literally whatever you want in it. I have no problem whatsoever if some authors want to depict forces that are based very heavily on historical European one’s. Doing that is just as valid as doing anything else and you shouldn’t feel bad for it. But one should always expect that for everyone who does that, some others will do something else. To see so little diversity being present in this challenge when taken as an amalgamated whole is quite frankly very bizarre and worrying.
_________________ "Oh, absolutely not. Trinitite may be an eldritch being that breaks the laws of physics, but even she can't replicate the insanity that is German Engineering!" - PyrrhicSteel on whether Trinities' machine shops can make a new gasket for a crane
“Yes, strategy,” she replied to Evelyn’s withering look. “Because I am merely an amateur. I cannot talk logistics.” - Seven Shades of Sunlight, in a latter chapter of Katalepsis
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