Shipbucket

I know, I think you have a valid opinion, thought I dont share the opinion outright, but I can see where the concern comes out. My secret fear is that without the challenges, the entire productivity would dry out and the community would diminish its creativity. But also, I think that once people get oversaturated by challenges, they will move on and start doing other things. Who knows. The cycle and rotation of different challenges is not set on the stone, but sort of sensing out what the hype demands. You should consider joining us in the discord, there is lot of going on there and would be lot better to approach the new generation who is completely clueless of these discussions in the forum.

To get more surge on real life drawings, we definetly need to keep the issue relevant, and this discussion is great for that part. All ideas to get that are welcome. I dont think also that real life challenge 2 would make that much of different, i think that we can repeat the same trick twice.

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

If you add some references to them and post it in sources and references, it might! finding the proper references often takes more time then drawing the ship, so if you provide the references the chance somebody else picks it up is higher.

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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

Some commentators raised earlier the issue of new members who prefer to participate in the challenges over making RL drawings due to perceived too high standards of expected accuracy (and therefore of research needed).
I'm not sure if that's the primary reason, but it certainly can be a significant factor. I'd say that it's part of what I'd call a "glamour problem" - we all like to see our work being praised etc. which is perfectly natural (let's face it: we post these drawings here, in public, largely because we hope for positive feedback). Unfortunately, many newcomers would apparently love to start with a battleship or an aircraft carrier - or at least a destroyer (well, not only newcomers - what's more numerous in the Archive - battleships or fishing cutters? - and what's more common in FD section - tanks or farm tractors? ), so when faced with an implicit expectation of "big research" (which stems from the obvious fact that big ship has a big area with lots of details to research), they may indeed feel discouraged and prefer to turn into fancifulness of challenges.
At the same time, they often seem to think that smaller vessels - say, corvette sized, or even "worse": patrol boat-sized are insufficiently glamorous for their attention. Problem is, that vessels of the 30-60 m length (100-200 ft) are IMHO good for "low-cost (in terms of effort and research needed) entry", because at the same time they don't have "too much area to research" (in terms of pixels into which it would be squeezed), but at the same time they aren't so small that depicting the details while preserving visual clarity becomes a problem.
(the drawing of the NS-935/Pelikan Poland-built Indonesian patrol boat I posted some month ago didn't exactly overworked me with research demands, precisely because there weren't too many elements to look at, and whole project was rather a matter of (few) days, rather than weeks or months)
(In the past, frigate-sized ships (generally, in 100 m range) were often suggested as good starting point, but with rising standards of "detailing + research" they may be - perhaps - already too demanding)
Problem is, how to encourage the newcomers to think that drawing smaller and less "fancy" vessels could be a fun too, and not very taxing for their short attention span?
I had some signals about "not necessarily the best atmosphere" there (some of them even in this thread), so I'm not too keen. Besides, I wouldn't be active there any more often than I am on this Forum.

This might be cultural related thing. For me, being a Fin, and having my introduction to military affairs from getting aware of our own navy and its small boats, and other hand, big ships and missiles of our neighbor, my natural preferences were already deeply wired into my brain when I started SB. Most of our current member base comes from US, and naturally, if they have followed the same road than I have, are wired towards US navy stuff and size of things.
But you are absolutely right, the research, (specially the gatekeeping elements of it) for smaller sized and rather well known ships are not that huge, and they would indeed form great starting point. They are also quite well presented in the bucket however.
Thats good argument, thought I dont think the atmosphere is that much different than in here the forum, things naturally process more hectic pace.... and well, there are the kids with their anime and memes doing shitposting, but I think more of no-nonsense presence there could give them proper rolemodels to look up into for better conduct

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

drawing smaller vessels can be allot harder as there is limited references to the less glamourous vessel's though that i found made it more challenging and more satisfying.

Eswube's not wrong (and a bitter reality check for sure), I can now realize and see why the themes of the challenges only made posters let out their creativity only on fictional/derivative designs while overlooking if not outright disregarding the need for such creativities on the core focus of SB: non-fiction designs (and the intelligent, analytical discussion it can bring—which I would leave to the "pros"). This rather reminded me of a discourse in the old "rant thread" many years ago about how so much talent was being "wasted" on AU/OC drawings when there's so many real-world/never-built designs to work on instead...

The bottom line is that while we must let people (and ourselves) be with what they draw, according to their skills, resources, experiences, preferences, and objectives, we've got to also empathize with what is being deemed concerning regarding the path of content creation here in SB (and what it would say about the platform's future)—everything what the original poster had brought up in the first place.

While I myself have largely focused on my own [inevitably overambitious ] AU projects (as motivation allows), with the challenges motivating me to finally materialize what's been stuck in my imagination for said purposes, this is a wake-up call for the community at large to, well, do something better. After all, it was in 2019 when we last made a "Real Designs" challenge, even if on paper the other challenges allow real-life content within their parameters. And I would openly welcome whatever the administration would make of these developments, if it's going to be for the obvious betterment of both the platform and the community in the grander scheme.

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>"Emotions are prohibited." —YoRHa No. 2, Type B ("2B"), NieR: Automata
>"Wow, if I wasn't a hardened killing machine, that mightta hurt..." —SSgt. John Lugo (1st SFOD-D), Spec Ops: The Line

A thing that made me not want to draw real life stuff anymore for challenges.
Is the fact that i had a superb drawing done that costed me years to get to the end result.... and it was finished a week before the challenge.
I posted it and some people nitpicked it was idiocracy that i wont the challenge.

This way if i draw for example this:


And it gets finished a few weeks ahead or finish it during while i work on it for a long time already, i dont even care of joining.


And to be fair, the timescale for challenges is too short for me to finish up real life ships.
I never draw real ships in just a week or something. It mostly takes me a half year up to years...

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Fryssian AU with Lt.Maverick 114
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=9802&p=193331#p193331

Embarked on: HNLMS Karel Doorman A833
To do list:
-Zeven Provincien class cruiser
-Joint support ship all sides
-F124 Sachsen class frigate
-F125 Baden-Württemberg class frigate
-Clemencau class aircraft carrier
-Zeven provincien class frigate
-Poolster class AOR
-Amsterdam class AOR
-Minas Gerais aircraft carrier

I'm glad kitbashing has been mentioned. I really enjoy that side of it. And the parts sheets were an amazing resource and then were rarely updated. which was a shame and thank you to those who maintain them. And to kit bash as well you need a supply of original drawings real and or fictional.

I'm not quite so sure if they are so well represented here. Some more popular classes of small warships - perhaps, but there are hundreds of classes/one-offs, both civilian and military (I mentioned patrol craft for a reason, because they are sometimes built even by small countries with very modest shipbuilding capacity), and in the current era of internet (and still a sizeable array of paper magazines aimed at hobbyists) it's IMHO reasonably possible to find sufficient sources (to make a drawing at a scale of 1 px to 15,24 cm) for quite a few of them (let's face it, we don't have - and never had - exorbitant numbers of actually drawing newbies).

(not mentioning, that while I'd personally prefer to see "all drawings of ships from a given class made by the same author" - or at least modified/kitbashed from one drawing - for the sake of commonality, there isn't, after all, any rule that would prevent newbies from trying to make their fully own versions - for example, the Pr.205 (Osa) is made in Russian, Polish, East German and Finnish colours, but some newbie could try to do one from scratch and paint it in colors of, say, Egypt)
Lol, ok, perhaps I'm not the best person to judge if the smaller vessels are more challenging to draw, because I'm drawing almost only small vessels and see big ones as "more hassle" instead. But I think that if we're talking about ships in the 30 - 60 meters range, then IMHO they are not that small so the "fitting all the details in limited space" would be so big problem. (not mentioning, that sometimes elements like bulwarks mercifully help to avoid many of such posibble problems).



And another thing - about challenges in general. Ok, now I'm just a nit-picking p***k, but perhaps my feelings towards the surge of challenges we see in recent years would be a tiny bit better, if all participants treated them in truly bona fide manner. I mean, without posting heavy tanks for liliputs, or infantry squads with s*x-toy-armed cartoon furries or 5th generation fighters from The Flintstones.
(but that's just venting of an annoyance on my part, not a serious issue)

I was not planning on posting to the forums again, but I feel I need to defend myself.
In case you didn't notice, I removed my entry (which was cleared by Kiwi as being OK to post) before voting began when I realized it wouldn't be taken as intended (a joke, not intending to earn any points, because I had little time to draw that month). I strongly reject the implication that my intentions were the same as the other two challenge entries mentioned, with no proof to that fact whatsoever. I implore you not to make such hasty assumptions when it comes to my work, as the intentions were in no way the same and neither was the end result.


Thank you, and good day.

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Projects:
Panelbucket - Aircraft Avionics and Instrument Panels in 15px=1cm: http://shipbucket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=10389
Clyde's Eagles - Cessna Aircraft since 1945: http://shipbucket.com/forums/viewtopic. ... 7&p=204669
Im Schatten des Adlers - An Alternate History Timeline: http://shipbucket.com/wiki/index.php/Ca ... des_Adlers