Shipbucket

There is really easy solutions to all proplems issued here; namely

1) if you dont like it (SB and its style), boohoo, go do something else.

2) Specially if you dont like the rules, Dont go attacking them and calling us by foul names, Such will not lead anything else than irritating our community. If you want to be part of it, it works via friendliness and mutual respect. Calling us autocratic ruleworshipers and Home Owner's Association... In my years of internet warrior, Ive been called by lot of names, but somewhere the line is and this is approaching it pretty fast...


Shipbucket has over 1000 members and everyday new artists join our discord. Some succeed to come really good artists, most understands quite well and easily what the style and it stylerules are about and adapt into the and prosper, yet every year we have these members who think the rules should be broken and only their own individual subjective take is important, only their vision matters and when this is turns into their vanity project crusade to change things that dont need to be changed. Eventually they all realise the futility of it all and leave, untill they mature or learn to cope it in some other way and they keep coming back. They always come back Of those 1000, 990 could be tossed away, and we would still be more virile community than we were when this all started. So dont make the mistake of thinking you are an important, or that your dissident opinion about the entire core of the style matters, becouse in the end I does not. We created and forged this style and we keep doing it, refining it and mastering it, but not this way, not with this attitude.

Acelancelot and Eswube has pretty much covered what the style rules are about, so I feel No need to repeat their stand.

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Shipbucket mainsite, aka "The Archive"
New AU project "Aravala"

Well, that sorts the dispute.
Great thanks to Gollevainen for making things clear.

So your approach is "make do or get lost you're not welcome here"? See where we're coming from when we say about stringent rules and over-zealous moderators alienating and driving away new creators willing to push the boundaries with advanced and better quality drawings?

Seems as though I've touched a nerve, I apologise (personally I think these are some pretty mild and tame descriptives aimed at no one user in particular), but I stand by my comments - anal rule worshiping stifles innovation and advancement and prevents the growth and evolution of the community.

If you feel that way, so be it. Personally, I think it's small minded. Your response does I think quite perfectly embody this attitude of older members worshiping outdated stylistic rules with little awareness of the complaints people have with it (if people keep bringing this up surely that might just mean something?). Frankly your statement is just dismissive ("Of those 1000, 990 could be tossed away"?!) and insulting towards the newer community of artists on this site - it's all "we", "your opinion doesn't matter", and all about rules a bunch of now middle aged blokes wrote over a decade ago. I'll stay on this platform and have made it quite clear to Eswube and Acelancelot that I'm happy to change uploads (within reason) to conform to arbitrary style rules, but I'm still taking this opportunity to air my displeasure with the way it is run and how outdated rules and policies are enforced in such a passive aggressive and deeply unhelpful manner by an autocracy of moderators who seem to neither listen nor care about complaints from newer users.

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Currently working on:
- AU Royal Navy
- Various FD scale aircraft

Well, getting back on pace



*This aircraft was apart of the Kampfgeschwader 74, part of Gruppen I. "8L-GT" would be lost during a bombing raid on a Allied airfield in France. Shot down by a Canadian Spitfire while returning to the wing's airbase. Engine 2 would be struck by 20mm fire and exploded, causing a uncontrollable dive. All men would be lost, including the wing commander."

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"The further you are from the sound of guns, the less you understand."
- General Walter Natyncyk, CAF

Project list -
realstrange
USN Hellcat sheet
Greek F-16's
USAAF B-24 Liberator mega sheet (Europe, Italy/North Africa, and Pacific)

You are just as quick to not care or listen to the arguments of the people who are trying to understand your point and make you understand why we are strict about certain rules.

Really, you chose to work in our style and post here (and to keep doing so) for a reason right? Try to work with the people already here, not against them.

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Drawings are credited with J.Scholtens
I ask of you to prove me wrong. Not say I am wrong, but prove it, because then I will have learned something new.
Shipbucket Wiki admin

Like I said in my reply, SB style is contantly involving and we have changed the rules many times and will propably keep changing them. This is not done however by subjective take of one artist going ballistic and starting to insult the rules and the SB staff when ever the existense of these rules has been expressed.
Now, like I also said, time to time this happens, and its usually done by narcistist and egoistic artists who cannot take critisism nor cannot comply to a style that follows some clear functions. So to them the rules are personal opression and reminding about them is clearly sign of authoritarian mindset and ect, ect. (your response covers most of the traits). Why these individuals appears in time to time? Who knows, art is not always entitiled to normal people. In many of these cases, the artists, after ragequiting SB have found their own style and own way of doing things, and In overall, thats quite happy outcome. If one cannot adadapt to the style set by others, one should not torment themselves to strangle itself in it. Best to do ones own thing when no-one is telling them why and how to draw.

SB is very welcoming to all new and old users (and returning dissidents who discover that the path I discripted above is lonely and sour), But like I also said, we are over 1000 members at the moment and there seems to be no end to our expansion... Now, you can imagine yourself what would happen to the consistency of the whole thing if every new special little snowflages irrational opinions would be taken account and everyone else would have to comply to them. Its just not going to happen. Not in SB not in any other art community who follows. some universal stylequide

Now, if this all still sounds really harsh and expression of "anal ruleworshiping by middle aged blokes", remember, You started it by going after SB and starting to insult it. Expect the people who actually spend large porpotions of their freetime and money to handle all this say thing or two about it. If we would be like North Korea or even a homeowners associsation, Youd propably would have been banned after the first whining post. Now you just marked yuorself in the eyes of the staff and propably lost all the credibility of your opinions regarding SB. I suggest that next time you wish to express your wish to destroy the guidelines, do it via building a respectfull approach towards the community and its members, and work your way up. After you have huge roster of art in under SB banner and spend countless of years among the other artists, you will find out that getting your way and opinion heard in such vast sea of artists suddenly becomes lot easier and lot more fruitfull. Mindset that a young newcomer can just march in to a etablished house and change and demand everyone play by their rules is always going to lead into fustration and ignorance of such opinions by the rest.

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Shipbucket mainsite, aka "The Archive"
New AU project "Aravala"

This seems a very over-hyped rant about what is essentially about two or three lines on an F-5.
If people really want to discuss the issue and actually progress the style let's actually discuss it and stop throwing the toys out of the pram.

I've been discussing some of these issues with eswube in PM separately in the light of the recent challenge. I see areas where we can improve and refine. Ultimately what people draw consistently together becomes the style over time. Rules are there for guidance to ensure anyone can join and start drawing and to provide a consistent basis. In theory anyone should be able to take a ship/plane/tank drawing from the archive and kitbash it or modify it relatively easily. In practice this happens less now, drawings are often too finely detailed and multi-layered to do this as easily but the basic concept should remain.

This is the WIP drawing of my challenge entry. Only 6 shades and black outlining for the entire drawing. You will observe that the canopy is outlined in darkest shade, as are the undercarriage doors. I agree that black can look ugly, I try to minimise it's use but that doesn't mean that I don't use it when necessary. (As an aside I love Blackbuck's salmon shades, I think everyone should be using this method, even if they don't use the salmons).


I agree that black can look ugly, I try to minimise it's use but that doesn't mean that I don't use it when necessary. For me outlines and external objects should be outlined in black, any hard 90 degree break (which the intake trunks and rear fuselage contours of the F-5 apply) should be outlined in black, control surfaces that move all the time should be outlined in black.
For anything else - curvy fuselages less than 90 degree break, canopy or door seals I am open to artist interpretation to use darkest shades possible.

Canopy outlining - for a pre-1950s unpressurised canopy (i.e. typical sliding hood) I would agree it should be black as its not integral with the airframe. For a modern sealed canopy the join line is very tight, more obvious than a panel line but not a clear break either. For me that is probably more realistically a very dark shade rather than black.

Cockpit transparency - this was always going to rear its head when we shifted away from cartoon blue window shades. There is no consistent approach yet, everyone has their own style. Some artists are using a transparent drawing layer now, but I think this makes it too 'milky'. Glass is see through - you either see through it or not.

Top-view shading - We're seeing is two schools of thought on how best to shade the top that allows you to bring out the curvature of the airframe - central spine highlight with equal shading each side Vs left highlight /right shadow.
The light source issue is tricky. If we assumed orthodox top-left corner then all top surfaces would be in highlight including the wings and the nose, only the tail section would ever be in shadow and the trailing edges of the wings. Likewise the hump behind a fighter canopy would be in shade too.
Left highlight/right shade at least allows some degree of flexibility, for example showing anhedral/dihedral on wings etc. As ewsube has noted, this does make recolouring a little tricker but I'm not sure that's a killer blow against the change.
Personally I am leaning to the left/right method, I think the results look better.

Riveting is a bugbear of mine, many artists are spam pixelling rivets that you would never see with the naked eye in most conditions. They also look messy.

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Hood's Worklist
English Electric Canberra FD
Interwar RN Capital Ships
Super-Darings
Never-Were British Aircraft

Looks really neat and promising.
But the name should be Étendard and not Entendard, IMO

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Je pardonne à tous ceux qui m'ont offensé... mais je garde la liste!


Worklist, FD scale submarines and ships :
- Project 971 "Akula" (80%)
- Project 705 "Alpha" (10%)
- Project 371 (70%)
- Project 1459 (30%)
- Projekt 151 Sassnitz (To be redone)

Hood's post and examble are really good thing to everyone pour their eyes bit more into. I will add few points of my own, that would hopefully clarify these issues raised for once and all.

In use of black outline, few key things everyone should take account, that comes from the core of the style

1) SB works are drawings, eg illustrations, where the linework leads and the color only compliments the linework and follows really strict and rudimentary basic rules. SB work is NOT PAINTING, where the color leads and linework can be non-existant. These two basic subdivition
exists in all sort of illustrations, and both can be done in pixels, even in clear or pure pixel style, but in SB the color has always been a flat fill and our very basic shading and highlighting has also followed this same method in somewhat blocky cellshading style, that essentially gives the charectaristic look to our work.

2) To fully understand lineart, It wouldnt be harm if our artists would take detour on other, non pixel work, where black linework (inking in most cases) is the main focus. While it might appear that the basic lineart doctrines like lineweight dont appear in SB, they actually do, just in our way, where the value of the color darkness works as the weight of the line, the boldest beeing presented as black and the lower scales the thin lines. Lineweight in SB does not follow the lightsource, but works as said here many times, as the outline. Hood's examble above covers pretty much how you would apply it on aircraft drawing on FD scale

3) its important to understand the seperation of the shading work done in the darker values of the base color and the lighter lineweight linework in the lighter values from black, even when these two are the same color (and if you are good, you should do it so). Both serve for distinct purpose in the drawing, and Ive sometimes noticed that people mix these two things, and or tries to seperate them with completely different set of value-changes. This later way often leads into a drawing with 20 or so different shades of the same color, and that serves as counterpoint to the entire concept of the arts uniformality and reusability (which Hood also mentioned in his post). Despite people, most notably young teenagers who have just joined SB in last few years do this, and it will result art that pops out quite well and is sort of eye-candy, It doesent automatically make it good SB art. SB artists should understand what they are doing and why and what purpose is each aspect of the style presenting in the total mix and how to impliment it.


About canopies and ect. As I said in point 1, SB work is not painting. And as we are flat color illustrations, we should always take that account when we work. Way too much Ive seen some members tryuing to fustratingly force SB style to be photograpich presentation
of reality, of which it by the very nature of it, cannot really ever be. If one wants to do photorealistic pixel art, I wont say its undoable, but it should be done as paintings, not as drawing. Once again, i suggest our artist to detour into general illustrations, comics and picturebooks, animations and other mediums where the general principles of what can be done with flat colors are well founded into the professionalism of the working artists. Some surfaces cannot be accurately portrayed in flat color illustrations, thus it has always lead into
artistical presentations to overcome them, and in those moves, the style's punchlines are usually devolped. For us it was long the plain blue, but since the overwhelming majority wanted something more, we changed the rules and begun to allow more experimentation. To keep the style's other parts intregrity in mind, there is not that many ways to draw glass and glowing/transparent objects. Hood's examble here basicly is the only accurate way of portraying it. Others have tried a style where they dangerously approach to gradient by adding the glare effect to the canopies. This is the eye-candy move, that scores high on the challenge votings, but its also really inconsistent looking way, as the glare effect is not 100% restricted to the glass in reality, so to retain consistency in the artwork themselves, it should be applied to elsewere also. But that leads to a question of lightsource, and why and how it suddenly would be different from the style rule and eventually you are into spiral into overdoing the colorwork in a artstyle thats supposed to be about the lines. Then the black indeed comes "ugly" and its slipperyslope that only leads into painting style that has to get rid of the linework and be more creative and realistic in its use of lighting.

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Shipbucket mainsite, aka "The Archive"
New AU project "Aravala"

I see I've missed quite a discussion in here

My view on this is that the black lines are the "defining" feature of the line art that makes a Shipbucket drawing truly a "Shipbucket drawing". Newcomers over the years have advanced the style in many ways (all for the better) but the black lines are the bedrock of the style. Part of the challenge of our format is working within this constraint.

Several very talented artists have come and gone over the years because of this rule but SB is still "alive and kicking". I don't think there's any need for angry or frustrating discussion on this topic.

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USN components, camouflage colors, & reference links (World War II only)