For the people saying it looks compressed, it actually is because when you see it in the featured image template, it’s shrunken, and it’s still shrunken even when you go to the page. Once you’re here, you have to click it again to see the full resolution, and it looks much better. The appeal of pixel art is seeing the detail of all the crisp pixels, so when you shrink it, it loses that and becomes muddy, and muddy pixel art really suffers, so I think it’s the site resizing the image and then people reacting to that before they get a proper look at it.
@The Smiling Pony
Fair enough; I agree that people are going too far here with what they’ve said.
I still don’t think there is anything wrong with the people who can’t enjoy this image because of the things I’ve previously mentioned. There is a difference between expecting high brow technically perfected pieces and expecting art that doesn’t use pre-made shape tools and excessive copy/paste.
With the amount of artists making equally cute and debatably more technically advanced art, I’m not surprised people are salty that this got featured. Not supporting them being rude, I’m just not at all surprised. Sometimes simpler images are more effective and it all comes down to personal taste.
@Gibberish Pony
I said ‘only’; constructive criticism should always be welcome. What some people give is far from that.
In any case, this is supposedly a fandom for a cute and funny cartoon animated in a decade old version of Flash; high-brow art and technical perfection should not have been what drew people here.
@The Frowning Pony
While I definitely support your sentiment that art is subjective and definitely partially dependent on feelings, there’s nothing wrong with seeing the other side of the coin. You don’t need to pity people who see the ways an art piece could be improved, nor the glaring issues within said piece. It can be hard to see the bigger picture and have feelings for an artwork when there are certain issues that pop out immediately (circle tool and repasted flowers for example). You should pity the people who use those things to tear the artist down, of course, but it seems like a lot of people are opting to create an environment where not blindly appreciating a piece makes you a bad person. Constructive criticism is a must for improving at your craft.
@Background Pony #89CE
She’s funny and cute; that’s what makes up half of all likeable OCs, with the other half mostly being lewd.
As for why this was featured: I saw a few of the OC’s images and found them cute and/or funny, so I nominated this one that managed to make me smile a bit for the internal vote system. Other mods voted it for their own reasons (one can’t vote on their own nominations) and it won for this round.
I didn’t care that it’s not “technically great” or whatever; that’s not what the featured image thing is about. I thought it was a nice image and thought other people would appreciate seeing it as well, so I put it forward. That simple. If someone looks at an image like this and sees only errors or incorrect lines or aliasing or the like, then I pity them beyond words, because what I see is something that makes me feel a bit happier.
@Background Pony #4216
If she wants to do pixelated art that’s fine, but mixing pixelated lines and smooth/soft shading makes it look a bit… disorganized. Besides, she specifically said she doesn’t use anti-aliasing because it makes the brushes look fuzzy, hence the idea of trying another program. At the right resolution the brushes shouldn’t be doing that.
It seems like you use a lot of shortcuts in your art, which can be convenient but is also really distracting at times. The circle tool heads, the copied and pasted flowers. The soft shading on a picture with heavily pixelated line art seems very mismatched. I know what you mean about wanting the background to be simple as to not distract from the character, but there are better ways of doing this. My eye is immediately drawn to the one “branch” of the willow tree that is so thin it’s just a black line. The downsized flowers almost seem blurry or compressed.
I see what you were going for overall, but I’m sort of on the fence of where to stand here. For starters, I agree that you should do what makes you happy, and if the things you do in your art now are satisfying for you then you shouldn’t have to change things up. However I’ve heard more than enough times that you’re not happy with your work, so I wonder why you keep producing the same quality over and over. Not to say it’s as simple as suddenly “getting better”, but overall your art has this sort of… lazy quality to it.
If I had any advice, Noot, it’d be for you to stop using premade circle/line tools, get brushes with anti-aliasing (if it’s impossible in your current program you can try SAI, the default brushes work just fine), add more variation to props/background, and perhaps practice expressions. You have cute down par, but things seem a bit samey from you across the board. There are dozens upon dozens of amazing tutorials online for getting you started in practically anything you’re interested in attempting.
All this aside, the image was featured for a reason, and even if I and others don’t necessarily think the art is of the quality we expect, it’s pretty simple to just give constructive criticism or don’t say anything at all. Congratulations on being featured, and I hope some of the nicer comments here can steer you towards improving in the future.
It’s always a good idea to try out a bunch of different tools and pick the one that works best for you. Though at the same time, you should study the core concepts too, so that if you’re in a situation where you have to use a different tool, it won’t hinder you much.
@Pizzamovies
Site mods/assistants can nominate and vote on featured images for whatever reason they want. Other than having to be visible under the “Default” filter, there’s no limitations on what can be nominated or voted for, or for what reason. This got featured because enough people on staff, for reasons of their own choosing, felt it was worth featuring.
Me, personally, I always prefer featuring artwork created by artists who are active members of Derpibooru’s community. And if you ask the rest of the staff, it’s very rare for me to nominate or even vote for an image that was drawn by someone who doesn’t regularly participate in our community. But those are my reasons.
