Men-at-Arms Challenge

[Charguizard]

Many congrats to Snow, missed you by 3 points! Also to Sinny who showed us we didn't need fancy poses to score high. Thanks to Kiwi once more for a great and succesful challenge. I hoped for more entries but a few people sadly had trouble this time, Cap should've just entered his power armours honestly. Anyways here's my zero point zero two freedom pesos worth of opinion on the entries:

Mr. Sinny’s Edusa’s Army
This entry sticks to standards impeccably. Outlines go where they must and the shading and volume is fantastic without using immense palettes. The colours are the right brightness to represent what they are and all details are delicate and well represented. This drawing will be a valuable resource to people looking to draw era uniforms from outside Europe, and demonstrates that poses were not, in fact, needed to produce a killer submission (aye, its me saying this, I’m aware of the irony.). There are a few items which could feasibly cast a shadow, but its very minor.

BillKerman1234’s
United Federation of Planets Starfleet Command
Had to trawl through the Mucho Texto to make sense of everything. Design work seems to have been limited to adapting to the subjects’ anatomies and to the medium. Artwise its bright and attractive but the two leftmost facial expressions could be a bit better.

Aiseus’s Highland Armies of the Unification Wars
Excellent designs, believable and appropriate to their roles. Could play around with shadow a bit more to hint more volume. The arms of the two rightmost figures seem a bit long and awkward, adding a little perspective would’ve shortened them. Feet might be too large on the last figure.

El_Snow’s Zephyrian Army at War
The first genuinely excellent pose appears. Just the dog carries this entry through. The faint eyebrows are the only real letdown on each fig. Camouflage is gorgeous, very well done. The designs are a bit safe but adequate.

The_Sprinklez/etccommand’s Uniforms of Stargate Command
Being a literal trace of promo pics doesn’t detract from this entry being visually excellent. Dealing with cross eyes is a bit hard at this scale.

SanSilv’s The American-Saderan War
Buenísimo el Cholo we. Good attention to details. Mid fig could’ve used more shadow on pants and under the hat.

MattewEx’s Argentina’s Law Enforcement Agencies.
Well drawn and detailed, pouches could cast shadows. Believable and attractive outfits.

Corp’s Martian Espatiers
Damn good designs, good but improveable drawings. The pilot’s suit’s detail lines could be more defined and less abundant. A lot of details that stick out could cast a shadow. The boarding guy’s face looks very cool when the screen rises but I would’ve added a bit of glare to the screen. The EVA suit is great and looks super menacing with the screen down, could also use glare with the screen up.

PsychicUmbreon’s The New Grand Army Post 2017 Reforms
Should’ve taken the time for a 3rd figure. The figures are not shaded at all and thus poorly defined. There’s a few tricks one could’ve used to make the leftmost face look older.

Andrzej1’s Forces of Dagor Dagorath
Too many tones for too little contrast. This in turn makes the non outlined drawings look hazy. Eyes and sensors would’ve been perfect to be more creative. More than lack of skill this entry is a lot of missed opportunities

Maxwell John’s Warriors of the 6th Legion
Needs shading, badly. Lazy camouflage schemes. Why does a truck driver need so much stuff in their backpack?

Dick Nixon’s Armies of the Late American City-State Period
Could use a tiny bit more contrast. Some of the shapes on the power armour are made a bit confusing by the highlighting and shading. The cape is a missed opportunity to really stand out by alternating base tones and shading, which admittedly would be very complicated in MS Paint. Excellent designs.

Mauser’s Commanders during the hellenic constitutional crisis.
The middle figure is the most interesting one, the machine gun is well drawn. I think more of the helmet would be visible on the sides of the head, down to mouth level, and the top of the vision slit should be the uppermost visible edge. The two other figures are not as interesting, not having much equipment, insignia or an interesting pose. They don’t look particularly old, you’d these ranks to look a bit older. I believe lapels, jackets, pouches and belts should cast a pixel of shadow downwards. Also cuffs should probably not be outlined in black on their edge towards the sleeve.
The title should really have the first letters in caps.

Charguizard’s Victorious Flock Infantry
It took me a while to figure out a good theme for this challenge, because I hadn’t been drawing in this scale for a bit. I knew I had to do original poses to make the entry more eye catching. But then I had the idea to draw a combat droid and everything came together. The sharp minds will see in the droid a similar silhouette to the combat droids in Dark Empire I comic. I actually hand drew the droid first on my tablet and then scaled and traced that drawing for this. It was going to be metallic in colour at first but they’re probably not actually made of metal and wouldn’t be left in bare metal either. Then the Chikol infanteer was drawn, and I’m really proud of that one so it’ll be coloured and posted on twitter later. As you can see Chikols are tiny, and I sincerely hope some people zoomed in a bit, but it provides good contrast to the other two figures. Lastly I wanted to draw a Boronthian in a “Gunman” power armour/protomech, which already existed in my universe, but I had not designed yet. I ran out of time so in the end I traced a Starship Troopers power armour while looking at a Hyper Dunc from Dorvack. I really liked how this one turned out so it’ll get drawn on the tablet as well.

Kat Tsun’s Military Zombies of the UN’s Global Security
Another Certified Kat Banger. Shading is superb, volume carefully controlled. The designs are interesting and mostly believable. The poses are boring BUT this was done in a single afternoon so hey.

[Sapphire262]

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.

[Shigure]

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.

I don't know if you're trolling or not and quite frankly I don't really care, but please for the love of god do not bring identity politics to Shipbucket. This community is niche and we are all hobbyiests, people will draw who and what they want. I'm not a forum moderator but do not do this again.

[heuhen]

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.

I don't know if you're trolling or not and quite frankly I don't really care, but please for the love of god do not bring identity politics to Shipbucket. This community is niche and we are all hobbyiests, people will draw who and what they want. I'm not a forum moderator but do not do this again.

Shipbucket have strict written rules and non-written rules. We do not discuss politics in shipbucket. But as admin will probably remind us all about:

http://shipbucket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2
1. Mutual respect among forum members is expected at all times. Personal attacks, vendettas, trolling, or sniping at other users is counterproductive and not allowed.
9. When providing feedback to other users posting their drawings, make sure any criticism is polite and constructive in nature.
11. Policing the forum is the job of the staff. Please do not "backseat moderate"; if you see someone breaking the rules, report the post and staff members will handle it.

[Charguizard]

To prevent a dogpile which is already forming I will demand the following from the community.
Shipbucket is not a theater of cultural war for identity politics. Ethnical issues are to be relegated to each artist's own internal forum, and their art and stories must express their own beliefs and ideas, and can be shared here provided they remain respectful. Do not under any circumstance attempt to subvert the ultimate goal of the Shipbucket community with thought policing. Art and drawing production must and will prevail.

That's that.

Now for some legitimate commentary:

A lot of your commentary is regarding colour palettes. This scale/style owes a lot to Franscale, a style which rarely if ever used shading. The move towards 3 shades was seen by myself as a great leap forward and plenty enough. Shade proliferation has to be kept in check at some point, I'm not going to give a determinate judgement on how much is too much but I've used 5 tones during this challenge.

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.

These are the basic bodies I shared way back then, which are based on anatomy diagrams by Andrew Loomis and my own perception of anatomy. Since then other people have produced and shared bodies with different proportions, noticeably by Aiseus.

(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)

All of my figures are at the exact same scale, 1px=1.5cm, and they overlap in the same way as real Osprey covers sometimes do, check out for example Men-At-Arms, Rommel's Desert Army or Elite, Vietnam Marines 1965-73.

[Sapphire262]

Okay, I genuinely have no clue what you guys are all talking about. What do politics have to do with any of this? Literally none of what I said was political in any way shape or form.

A lot of your commentary is regarding colour palettes. This scale/style owes a lot to Franscale, a style which rarely if ever used shading. The move towards 3 shades was seen by myself as a great leap forward and plenty enough. Shade proliferation has to be kept in check at some point, I'm not going to give a determinate judgement on how much is too much but I've used 5 tones during this challenge.


These are the basic bodies I shared way back then, which are based on anatomy diagrams by Andrew Loomis and my own perception of anatomy. Since then other people have produced and shared bodies with different proportions, noticeably by Aiseus.


All of my figures are at the exact same scale, 1px=1.5cm, and they overlap in the same way as real Osprey covers sometimes do, check out for example Men-At-Arms, Rommel's Desert Army or Elite, Vietnam Marines 1965-73.

Okay, the shading you used was 3-tone because the additional tones were used to denote panel lines and drop shadows as best as I can tell - the tones used to denote angle of a surface relative to the light source only came in 3 varieties. Like you, I also can't make an objective value judgement on how many shades or what style is best. I can say that I personally prefer 5 shades, applied according to consistent rules (that latter part is the really important bit that a lot of people get wrong - again, in my opinion). If other's share this opinion is up to them, and I won't judge either way, beyond docking points when it comes to voting.

If I'm not mistaken, based on some comments you made on the Discord server, you depicted Chikol Master Kiki Awao further back than the others and thus much smaller (if I've misinterpreted this please let me know! I'd love to be proven wrong in this case). Kiwi Imperialist, on 17/07/2023 at 0245 said:

"Figures facing a different direction, performing some action, and so forth are allowed. I will permit some degree of perspective, though the three figures should be in the same plane/at the same distance from the viewer so deviation from the scale is not drastic."

I'm willing to overlook this personally because I think the drawing is very good and just in general I like to play fast and loose with the rules. However, I still thought it would only be ethical for me to point it out in case others disagreed.

[acelanceloet]

We are a group of people (drawing nerds, many of us) which I suspect are mostly western, mostly English speaking (some as second or third language), mostly male (military stuff nerds tend to be) which is drawing AU stuff which we choose. Most people draw AU stuff that they are interested in, identify with, or is historically accurate in some way. We are all most familiar with western, male military stuff as that is most of what references we have historically. In other words, there are some very logical explanations for what you call "bizarre and worrying". In other words, you are taking something which is based not on choice but on background and call it wrong. In other words, that is very closely related to if not the same as identity politics which this forum is not the place to talk about.

If you want to skew these "bizarre and worrying" symptoms, do something about it by inspiring people by showing it can be done differently, by drawing stuff yourself. If you want to change something, don't complain about it, do something about it yourself. Nobody else even thought about doing this analysis as you are the only one suggesting there is a problem though......

So can we please go back to talking about the amazing entries to this challenge and not how wrong they are as a group?

[Sapphire262]

We are a group of people (drawing nerds, many of us) which I suspect are mostly western, mostly English speaking (some as second or third language), mostly male (military stuff nerds tend to be) which is drawing AU stuff which we choose. Most people draw AU stuff that they are interested in, identify with, or is historically accurate in some way. We are all most familiar with western, male military stuff as that is most of what references we have historically. In other words, there are some very logical explanations for what you call "bizarre and worrying". In other words, you are taking something which is based not on choice but on background and call it wrong. In other words, that is very closely related to if not the same as identity politics which this forum is not the place to talk about.

If you want to skew these "bizarre and worrying" symptoms, do something about it by inspiring people by showing it can be done differently, by drawing stuff yourself. If you want to change something, don't complain about it, do something about it yourself. Nobody else even thought about doing this analysis as you are the only one suggesting there is a problem though......

So can we please go back to talking about the amazing entries to this challenge and not how wrong they are as a group?

Oh, sorry, I forgot to consider that! I have always assumed that shipbucket had a fairly representative sample of people from across the world, thus I got very concerned that collective peer pressure or something was causing people to not draw what they actually wanted to, and instead somewhat conform to cultural standards and the prexisting norms present out of a desire to not draw potentially negative attention to themselves (as illustrated by, to give just one example, the constant bashing of any anime-related content that was persistent throughout the Discord back when I first joined and can still somewhat be seen today). If you're right, and the people here aren't as diverse as I assumed, then that makes a lot more sense, and I retract my previous concerns. Thanks for pointing that out!

(I still don't understand what you mean when you say identity politics though, I'm not familiar with that term and even after looking it up I still don't see what politics has to do with any of this)


As for going back to talking about the entries;

I do think that overall the entries we got to this were very good. None of them, in retrospect my own included, got anywhere near as close to prefect as they could have, and some were very basic or missing shading, but even the most basic ones had a level of effort put into them that is quite commendable. I must say, and I really am an idiot for not clarifying this in my first post, that all of my comments were made measuring the entries in relation to some hypothetical 'perfect' submission - or at least my view of what that would be - but when measuring them relative to the average quality of most SoBu scale figures that have been drawn over the ages, they do in fact stack up extremely well in my opinion. Everyone here should absolutely be proud of what they've done! Even the person who had literally no black lines in their drawing and had highly inconsistent shading still produced a much better drawing than my first dozen or two attempts at SoBu scale stuff, by a very large margin.

[Shigure]

http://shipbucket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2

11. Policing the forum is the job of the staff. Please do not "backseat moderate"; if you see someone breaking the rules, report the post and staff members will handle it.

You wouldn't have known this since you're not in the Discord, but I'm a staff member too.

Oh, sorry, I forgot to consider that! I have always assumed that shipbucket had a fairly representative sample of people from across the world, thus I got very concerned that collective peer pressure or something was causing people to not draw what they actually wanted to, and instead somewhat conform to cultural standards and the prexisting norms present out of a desire to not draw potentially negative attention to themselves (as illustrated by, to give just one example, the constant bashing of any anime-related content that was persistent throughout the Discord back when I first joined and can still somewhat be seen today). If you're right, and the people here aren't as diverse as I assumed, then that makes a lot more sense, and I retract my previous concerns. Thanks for pointing that out!

Surely you'd realize the 'anime bashing' is a joke since like 3-4 members of the staff are weebs.

On the point of 'peer pressure', so many of the entries here were of aliens and people in space suits and mechas. I see a great amount of diversity here. You also can't really tell ethnicity at this scale aside from large skin tone differences.

About Shipbucket 'not being diverse': this wouldn't matter if it was true, and it isn't. I've interacted with members all over the world in the Discord server. The only thing that matters is our united love for drawing pixel art and over analysing military vehicles.

Anyways that's done and done.

[heuhen]

http://shipbucket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2

11. Policing the forum is the job of the staff. Please do not "backseat moderate"; if you see someone breaking the rules, report the post and staff members will handle it.

You wouldn't have known this since you're not in the Discord, but I'm a staff member too.

Then the admin should have you moved to "global moderator"-rank in the forum. You are currently listed as a "Longtime Supporter" in the forum. You might be a "staff member" in discord, but that is to keep the discord section under control not the forum. And admin haven't said anything about Discord staff is moderating the forum as well. Not announced in the forum at least, where it counts. But now we are just bickering..