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TCOD Survivor (RESULTS IN, EIGHTH CHALLENGE UP)
- Thread starter Ether's Bane
- Start date
turbler
New member
Re: TCOD Survivor (FIRST CHALLENGE UP)
Done and Sent. sorry it took so long... my Grad is tonight, and pokemon trading card game nationals was saturday, and in between was gettin ready for grad. so I've been zetta slow doing everything else (cookie to anyone who gets the reference)
EDIT: Skroy Horitz wins himself not one, but TWO cookies :P
Done and Sent. sorry it took so long... my Grad is tonight, and pokemon trading card game nationals was saturday, and in between was gettin ready for grad. so I've been zetta slow doing everything else (cookie to anyone who gets the reference)
EDIT: Skroy Horitz wins himself not one, but TWO cookies :P
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Skroy
Eh... =P
Re: TCOD Survivor (FIRST CHALLENGE UP)
Slabs Of Ham, Celery And Horseradish, Tons Of Asparagus. What the factor? You're out of your vector for referencing TWEWY. But hey, who gives a digit? ^w^
Let's hope we get some results tomorrow. I can't wait for it.
EDIT: YAY! COOKIES!
Slabs Of Ham, Celery And Horseradish, Tons Of Asparagus. What the factor? You're out of your vector for referencing TWEWY. But hey, who gives a digit? ^w^
Let's hope we get some results tomorrow. I can't wait for it.
EDIT: YAY! COOKIES!
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Ether's Bane
future Singaporean
- Pronoun
- he
Jack_the_White
Fuck
- Pronoun
- she/her
Re: TCOD Survivor (FIRST CHALLENGE UP)
I'm sorry for the delay; my power went out just as I was judging the last sprite and I lost the whole thing, forcing me to then retype it all.
VICIOUSNESS ALERT! Yes, I am mean. :( Sorry.
How my grading works: /5 for general spriting skill (i.e. how well you grasp the basic rules of spriting and how well you scratch, shade, outline and so on), /3 for originality and composition (i.e. the Pokémon you use and which parts you put where), and /2 for coloring (i.e. how well the colors were picked, whether they're eye-hurting, how well they suit the Pokémon and generally how good the final outcome looks).
Slartibartfast
This doesn't have a lot of technical problems, but unfortunately that is mostly because there is so very little to it in general - it is not very interesting, not very ambitious, and not even very purple. I can forgive the lack of purple, since the rules technically only seem to require you to recolor in the colors of a Pokémon that is purple (which one could consider Mewtwo to be) rather than specifically recoloring it purple, but still, in this challenge, it stands out very oddly to see something that's just Mewtwo's gray.
In general Mew/Mewtwo splices are overdone, and when people do them, this is generally how, barring that the slightly more ambitious spriters tend not to be satisfied with just a headswap and therefore try to scratch in something resembling Mewtwo's tail. It's boring, and while the head is decently spliced on, that doesn't say much about your abilities as a spriter.
You also neglected to consider that Mew and Mewtwo have slightly different shading styles, and thus Mew's body looks overall "softer" than Mewtwo's head in this splice, but it's not glaringly noticeable, I suppose.
General spriting skill: 2/5. While there is little in the way of mistakes, per se, it is simply not ambitious enough to show a lot of skill. This is a contest, guys! You're supposed to be showing off the best you can do!
Originality and composition: 0/3. This is about the most straightforward thing one could think of for this contest: take a very well-known purple Pokémon, slap its head onto its counterpart, and then recolor it.
Coloring: 1/2. While the color isn't bad in itself, in addition to not actually being purple, it's all just one color - rather dull.
Total: 3/10
Flora and Ashes
This is quite cute and not too badly put together, if rather small and simple. I think the colors are the worst thing about it, really; that purple and blue really don't look good together, at least not on this, and as I look at it one of the first thoughts to strike me is how much better it would look in Meowth's colors. The lack of Meowth's colors also gives it a second problem, which is that it, well, needs more Meowth. It's not a very balanced splice this way; it would have been nice to add the whiskers or something.
Your technical problems are firstly that the charm is off-center, and secondly that you recolored the light brown "transition color" between the cream and brown on Meowth's tail to a light blue which in the new color scheme actually contrasts more with the purple than the darker blue - instead of the softening gradient effect the lighter color had on the original Meowth sprite, it ends up looking kind of like it has a light blue rubber band around its tail. I also have an issue with where the pink inside the left ear (our right) is attached to the head - there is this sharp corner of light lavender pixels that could really be blended better with the ear by putting a darker pixel or two there.
General spriting skill: 3/5. Again, there aren't a lot of serious mistakes, but that is largely because it's not a particularly ambitious sprite - it's a purple Pichu with a couple of Meowth parts pasted onto it. If you had gone with something that showed off more skill, I could probably have given you a 4.
Originality and composition: 2/3. Though it's not the most original idea in the world, it's not by any means unoriginal either. The main problem is just the need for more Meowth in it to balance the splice, plus that I at least personally think the charm looks too big for Pichu's head and that it would have been better if you'd scratched a new one.
Coloring: 1/2. It's not that it's bad per se, but the colors don't look very good together like this and when my first thought about a splice entered in a purple challenge is that it would look so much better if it weren't purple, there is a problem.
Total: 6/10
Blastoise428
You pretty much have the opposite problem from the previous two - while it's an amusing idea and reasonably ambitious (splicing two Pokémon with drastically different body proportions), the execution really butchers it.
What happened to the shading on Chansey's outlines, first of all? Making the outlines all black is a big no-no. The beak looks kind of flat and not really attached to the face; it worked on Noctowl because the rest of it was brown, but when you've got one little brown/cream object in the middle of purple, you can't really get away with a complete lack of shading on both the object itself and its outlines. The patterns on the egg pouch are off-center and clearly copy-pastes of the same dark spot from Noctowl. The feet are also obviously both the same foot pasted on twice, and what's worse, the right one, which should be behind the left, actually appears in front of it because you pasted it on afterwards. There is a random dark pixel in the outline of the "eyebrows" (you might have wanted to make them more eyebrowish, by the way; they're a bit too high up here for them to look like eyebrows, and it is much funnier if they are taken as eyebrows) that worked on the original Noctowl sprite because that was where the line intersected with the outline of the head but absolutely does not work here.
And sadly, the colors are frankly terrible; the purple is eye-hurtingly bright, purple and brown are just about the last two colors you should mix, and the random Chansey red on the head flaps sticks out like a sore thumb. You have the same problem there as Flora and Ashes, by the way: the medium pink there, the transition color into the light pink on Chansey's body, contrasts more harshly with the purple of the body than the red does.
General spriting skill: 0/5. There are just so many elementary mistakes, like the copy-paste feet and the all-black outlines, and so little (well, basically nothing) I could point to as being done right. :/
Originality and composition: 3/3. The concept is pretty original and potentially hilarious and both Pokémon are easily recognizable in it.
Coloring: 0/2. The purple is too bright and goes horribly with Noctowl's brown. And what's with those little teal pixels in the eyes and feet?
Total: 3/10
RandomTyphoon
This is both hilarious and disturbing, but I didn't realize what the other Pokémon in the splice was until I noticed Clefable's wings. Why didn't you keep the ears or curl? Right now it looks like some sort of an eldritch abomination born when a Combusken is trying to hatch from an egg and fails, and the only Pokémon the egg shape will evoke is Chansey. Then there is the mouth, which looks extremely odd; it's like a gradient and I can't even really tell if it's supposed to be open or closed.
That said, those are not the only problems. On the technical side, we have the outline on the top left (our left) of the head: there is a very conspicuous bump on it where you removed the ear, and it's mostly black and dark even though it should be the most highlighted part of the sprite. Combusken's feather crest is at the wrong angle compared to the body, which makes it look awkward, and there is an ugly cluster of black pixels near the bottom of the crest where it happens to come next to the outline. Another ugly cluster of black is near where the left arm (our right) connects to the body, between the arm and the wings.
On the stomach you tried to scratch an area where the purple lower body can be seen behind the lighter feathers of the upper body; this scratched area is all highlighted, which looks kind of odd because it should be shadowed by those feathers.
General spriting skill: 2/5. It's ambitious, I'll give you that, but you couldn't really handle it well enough; those clusters of black are just really ugly, the feather crest looks wrong, and there is that terrible bumpy scratch outline.
Originality and composition: 2/3. It's original and amusing, but needs more Clefable to be a balanced splice.
Coloring: 1/2. The colors are not precisely ugly, but it just looks really monochromatic - light purple and darker purple, with absolutely no other colors to break it up.
Total: 5/10
Mewtwo
This is one of those sprites that doesn't look too bad when you just glance at it, but when you give it a good look and zoom in, it's riddled with problems. First of all, you forgot to recolor some bits of outline - there is still brown in the near wing and left (our right) hind leg's talons, and red in the talons on the right front leg (our left), in addition to some random gray pixels in that leg and the outlines of some facial features being bluish-gray. These are really elementary mistakes.
The wings have their own glaring problem, which is that they're lighter than the body - I'm guessing you recolored the Pidgeotto first and then pasted the wing on. The bad thing about doing that is that you can then find out that the coloring in parts that are supposed to be connected to one another doesn't match. It's fine for the inside of the wings to be lighter, but the 'arm' portion should be the same color as the body it is connected to, and the fact it isn't makes the wing look all the more pasted on. To make matters worse, the feathers closest to the body have a couple of random highlighted pixels, leftovers from Pidgeotto, which make no sense here as that part of the wing should be shadowed by the body. Those pixels, as it happens, really stand out even without zooming in. The least you could do is fix faults that are conspicuous even when viewing the sprite at normal size.
Then there are the legs, which, I'm sorry to say, are just not well done. Your attempts to narrow them so that the talons fit on seem really half-hearted, especially on the raised front leg, which looks like it's made of rubber and has no outline on the underside of it. In general you hardly even seem to attempt to blend the talons properly with the legs - see especially the right hind leg (our left), where there is a black outline between them. The other hind leg has a random patch of light purple, which was originally the light blue on Luxray's leg, but on this sprite it looks like demented highlighting gone horribly wrong thanks to the way the talons randomly add a shadow above them. Finally, the talons bear very strong signs of having been taken off different Pokémon originally thanks to conspicuous style differences such as the number of shades they use and whether their outline is all black or partly gray.
All in all this sprite really needs editing to look properly like one whole.
General spriting skill: 1/5. The novice mistakes like failing to recolor all the outlines and add outlines when narrowing the legs are really dragging you down here. It has some ambition to it, but fails to deliver.
Originality and composition: 2/3. Gryphons are not the epitome of original in themselves, but they have the advantage that there are so many ways to make them that no two are the same. It's reasonably well composed, too; it's just the execution that butchers it.
Coloring: 1/2. It's not eye-hurting or anything, but the body looks a bit monochromatic despite the head having more colors to it, and the yellow of the ears doesn't go so well with that purple.
Total: 4/10
Treechu
I giggled when I saw this. It's a hilarious, surprisingly well-executed, ambitious splice; good job.
It is not without its problems, however. Most noticeable to me is that the outline on the top left of the head is rather odd; it is in the most highlighted part of the sprite but nonetheless there are some random dark pixels in the middle of the highlighted outline. The shading near the top of the head does not quite imply the right shape, and the nose shadow right now makes it look like a huge dent - it would have to be a bit further to the right to work as the shadow of the bridge of the nose. Finally, the mouth is large enough here to make it really warrant a bit of shading. (Also, the eyes are very asymmetrical, but I'll forgive you that since it makes it funnier.)
That said, most of the shading is pretty good and most of the scratch editing looks great, so kudos on that.
General spriting skill: 4/5. While it has those problems, those are more advanced mistakes than those many other entrants are making, and overall the sprite has a great deal of scratch editing and so on which is mostly pulled off well.
Originality and composition: 3/3. It is one of the more hilarious sprites ever created, mixes two extremely unlikely Pokémon and does it well.
Coloring: 2/2. It's a nice purple, it works, and the general simplicity of it coupled with the red mouth stops it from seeming too monochromatic, avoiding one of the recurring problems with a lot of the entries here.
Total: 9/10
Skroy Horitz
I actually took quite a liking to this when I saw it. I especially like how you blended the legs. It's a surprisingly successful splice of two Pokémon of wildly different sizes, and you deserve credit for that.
Giving it a better look and zooming in, however, reveals some strange problems. First of all, there are the monocolor outlines of the yellow Absol parts. I'm still wondering what possessed you to do that. The shading on the legs is rather odd and makes them look kind of striped, since the outlines of the shadows don't entirely follow the contours of the legs. Then there is the dark gray - both on the stomach near the neck fur and as the mask on its face - which is no longer sufficiently dark to distinguish itself from the purple and thus looks quite odd. The neck fur itself could use more shading under the head. The furred aura-sensor things look rather wildly different in style from one another and the right one (our left) has no shading whatsoever, while the left one does not look properly attached to the head. Finally, you have one bit of gray outline on the right leg (our left).
General spriting skill: 2/5. While it does have the aforementioned problems, it's reasonably ambitious in splicing a big Pokémon with a small one and succeeds fairly well at it, creating a creature that looks pretty cool in its own right. There's decently done scratching and good blending. However, as I said, there are those problems and they do drag you down quite a bit. I'd want to give you more, but I really can't give you a three when you've got monocolored outlines.
Originality and composition: 3/3. Riolu and Absol are interesting picks and you put it together pretty well.
Coloring: 2/2. I'm not a fan of Skuntank's colors in themselves, but you got them to look reasonably good on it.
Total: 7/10
Dr Frank
What is most painful about this is that Giratina and Drapion actually could look good spliced together: Giratina's golden parts are actually reasonably similar to Drapion's segments. I tried coloring Giratina's golden parts with Drapion's darker purple; it looked pretty cool. I also tried coloring Giratina's red parts with Drapion's blue, and that looked pretty good too. The reason this does not look good is that you didn't really care and thus just threw together a basic headswap.
Your big mistake here as you're trying to make something simple and easy for the challenge is using a legendary Pokémon. Legendaries tend to be shaded with more shades than ordinary Pokémon. It is also unfortunate that the other Pokémon you picked was Drapion, which has some of the darkest, most solid and clear-cut outlines of all Pokémon sprites. When you try to transfer Drapion's colors onto Giratina, Giratina has multiple shades in its outline, and since it has black only on the very darkest parts of it, you waste Drapion's other dark outline shade on the still-dark-but-slightly-less-so parts of Giratina's outline. The rest of its outline gets made up of much lighter colors which make it look strangely faded and very, very unlike Drapion's head - it might as well be recolored to some other Pokémon's colors, for all the stylistic consistency it achieves.
To boot, some of the outlines from the golden parts are missing, and the red and gold look pretty awful on it. You made an attempt to add a blue splotch to the tail, but there is no editing around it to make it look like a real feature of Giratina's body, making the end result look like you just sneezed and put that there by accident. You would have been much better off taking Giratina's tail off and adding Drapion's instead.
General spriting skill: 1/5. It's a headswap with one part of the body recolored; what skill is there to it? There are no glaring mistakes besides the wildly different styles of Drapion and the recolored Giratina body, but that's more because you didn't do much of anything you could have screwed up with.
Originality and composition: 0/3. It's a headswap; you could never get much for this. There does not appear to be much thought to it.
Coloring: 0/2. The recoloring is not done properly to make the style look good, and you really should have recolored the rest of Giratina instead of leaving the yellow and red parts.
Total: 1/10
SethGrey
My first thought when I saw this was "What's with the antennae?" Either you decide it shouldn't have them, in which case you need to erase where they sprout from the head too, or you decide it should have them, in which case you can't cut them off where they extend past the head.
But even though that's my first thought, that's sadly not the largest problem with this. Nothing about it is done well, to be honest; it's too much Butterfree and too little Beedrill/Ekans, the color is kind of eye-hurting, the Beedrill arms are copy-flipped and don't look like they're attached at the same place in addition to having a dark gray instead of black that makes them look really odd, the Ekans tail has seriously odd shading (partly thanks to being rotated and not reshaded), and the outlines have random gray and even brown pixels all over them.
General spriting skill: 0/5. You make practically every mistake in the book aside from saving it as a JPEG, and there are no real redeeming features that are done well. :/
Originality and composition: 0/3. Beedrill/Butterfree is pretty much a splicing cliché, and the Ekans tail, rather than making it fresh, just appears out of nowhere. There needs to be more Beedrill than just the arms in a proper Beedrill splice, and if the Ekans was meant to be part of the sprite as well, that needs to be in there more, too.
Coloring: 0/2. It's kind of eye-hurting and then there are those gray/brown outlines and the gray Beedrill arms and so on.
Total: 0/10
turbler
Automatic first thing I notice about this: it's saved as a JPEG. You just do not do that with sprites. I've judged sprite contests before where saving as a JPEG was an auto-zero, but I don't need to be able to auto-zero this since it is unfortunately quite bad without it.
First of all, it is obvious that you copied the sprite off the Internet, it had a black background, and you erased it with a Photoshop tool that had anti-aliasing on (another absolute no-no in any dealings with sprites). Or at least that's the only explanation I can think of for the randomly faded outlines. Then there's the part where the absolute only thing remotely Aipom about it is the hand pasted onto the tail, while the tail has been poorly recolored without recoloring the outlines. Well, okay, and the color being a slightly different purple with the inside of the ears yellow. Then I'm still puzzling over how you managed to add that lighter outline between the base and shadow colors. What is not wrong with it? This is not how you make a splice.
General spriting skill: 0/5. You break just about every elementary spriting rule there is. Save copy-flipping, because there is only one part actually spliced onto it.
Originality and composition: 0/3. While it's not "unoriginal", it's just a Grumpig with an Aipom hand added onto its tail and poorly recolored into Aipom's colors.
Coloring: 0/2. It wouldn't be a bad purple if it weren't for the poor recoloring job and those faded outlines that make it look like some sort of a ghost.
Total: 0/10
This means...
- Team Kanto has Notoriously Unknown (0 for not sending an entry), RandomTyphoon (5), Dr Frank (1) and turbler (0) for a total of 6 points
- Team Johto has SethGrey (0), Mewtwo (4), Flying Bread (0 for not sending an entry) and Treechu (9) for a total of 13 points
- Team Hoenn has Jack_the_White (0 for not sending an entry), Animorph (0 for not sending an entry), Flareth (0 for not sending an entry) and Slartibartfast (3) for a total of 3 points
- and Team Sinnoh has Flora and Ashes (6), Minkow (0 for not sending an entry), Skroy Horitz (7) and Blastoise428 (3) for a total of 16 points, winning this challenge and thus gaining immunity.
Alabaster had unfortunately left before I finished, so he will have to continue the game when he is back.
I'm sorry for the delay; my power went out just as I was judging the last sprite and I lost the whole thing, forcing me to then retype it all.
VICIOUSNESS ALERT! Yes, I am mean. :( Sorry.
How my grading works: /5 for general spriting skill (i.e. how well you grasp the basic rules of spriting and how well you scratch, shade, outline and so on), /3 for originality and composition (i.e. the Pokémon you use and which parts you put where), and /2 for coloring (i.e. how well the colors were picked, whether they're eye-hurting, how well they suit the Pokémon and generally how good the final outcome looks).
Slartibartfast
This doesn't have a lot of technical problems, but unfortunately that is mostly because there is so very little to it in general - it is not very interesting, not very ambitious, and not even very purple. I can forgive the lack of purple, since the rules technically only seem to require you to recolor in the colors of a Pokémon that is purple (which one could consider Mewtwo to be) rather than specifically recoloring it purple, but still, in this challenge, it stands out very oddly to see something that's just Mewtwo's gray.
In general Mew/Mewtwo splices are overdone, and when people do them, this is generally how, barring that the slightly more ambitious spriters tend not to be satisfied with just a headswap and therefore try to scratch in something resembling Mewtwo's tail. It's boring, and while the head is decently spliced on, that doesn't say much about your abilities as a spriter.
You also neglected to consider that Mew and Mewtwo have slightly different shading styles, and thus Mew's body looks overall "softer" than Mewtwo's head in this splice, but it's not glaringly noticeable, I suppose.
General spriting skill: 2/5. While there is little in the way of mistakes, per se, it is simply not ambitious enough to show a lot of skill. This is a contest, guys! You're supposed to be showing off the best you can do!
Originality and composition: 0/3. This is about the most straightforward thing one could think of for this contest: take a very well-known purple Pokémon, slap its head onto its counterpart, and then recolor it.
Coloring: 1/2. While the color isn't bad in itself, in addition to not actually being purple, it's all just one color - rather dull.
Total: 3/10
Flora and Ashes
This is quite cute and not too badly put together, if rather small and simple. I think the colors are the worst thing about it, really; that purple and blue really don't look good together, at least not on this, and as I look at it one of the first thoughts to strike me is how much better it would look in Meowth's colors. The lack of Meowth's colors also gives it a second problem, which is that it, well, needs more Meowth. It's not a very balanced splice this way; it would have been nice to add the whiskers or something.
Your technical problems are firstly that the charm is off-center, and secondly that you recolored the light brown "transition color" between the cream and brown on Meowth's tail to a light blue which in the new color scheme actually contrasts more with the purple than the darker blue - instead of the softening gradient effect the lighter color had on the original Meowth sprite, it ends up looking kind of like it has a light blue rubber band around its tail. I also have an issue with where the pink inside the left ear (our right) is attached to the head - there is this sharp corner of light lavender pixels that could really be blended better with the ear by putting a darker pixel or two there.
General spriting skill: 3/5. Again, there aren't a lot of serious mistakes, but that is largely because it's not a particularly ambitious sprite - it's a purple Pichu with a couple of Meowth parts pasted onto it. If you had gone with something that showed off more skill, I could probably have given you a 4.
Originality and composition: 2/3. Though it's not the most original idea in the world, it's not by any means unoriginal either. The main problem is just the need for more Meowth in it to balance the splice, plus that I at least personally think the charm looks too big for Pichu's head and that it would have been better if you'd scratched a new one.
Coloring: 1/2. It's not that it's bad per se, but the colors don't look very good together like this and when my first thought about a splice entered in a purple challenge is that it would look so much better if it weren't purple, there is a problem.
Total: 6/10
Blastoise428
You pretty much have the opposite problem from the previous two - while it's an amusing idea and reasonably ambitious (splicing two Pokémon with drastically different body proportions), the execution really butchers it.
What happened to the shading on Chansey's outlines, first of all? Making the outlines all black is a big no-no. The beak looks kind of flat and not really attached to the face; it worked on Noctowl because the rest of it was brown, but when you've got one little brown/cream object in the middle of purple, you can't really get away with a complete lack of shading on both the object itself and its outlines. The patterns on the egg pouch are off-center and clearly copy-pastes of the same dark spot from Noctowl. The feet are also obviously both the same foot pasted on twice, and what's worse, the right one, which should be behind the left, actually appears in front of it because you pasted it on afterwards. There is a random dark pixel in the outline of the "eyebrows" (you might have wanted to make them more eyebrowish, by the way; they're a bit too high up here for them to look like eyebrows, and it is much funnier if they are taken as eyebrows) that worked on the original Noctowl sprite because that was where the line intersected with the outline of the head but absolutely does not work here.
And sadly, the colors are frankly terrible; the purple is eye-hurtingly bright, purple and brown are just about the last two colors you should mix, and the random Chansey red on the head flaps sticks out like a sore thumb. You have the same problem there as Flora and Ashes, by the way: the medium pink there, the transition color into the light pink on Chansey's body, contrasts more harshly with the purple of the body than the red does.
General spriting skill: 0/5. There are just so many elementary mistakes, like the copy-paste feet and the all-black outlines, and so little (well, basically nothing) I could point to as being done right. :/
Originality and composition: 3/3. The concept is pretty original and potentially hilarious and both Pokémon are easily recognizable in it.
Coloring: 0/2. The purple is too bright and goes horribly with Noctowl's brown. And what's with those little teal pixels in the eyes and feet?
Total: 3/10
RandomTyphoon
This is both hilarious and disturbing, but I didn't realize what the other Pokémon in the splice was until I noticed Clefable's wings. Why didn't you keep the ears or curl? Right now it looks like some sort of an eldritch abomination born when a Combusken is trying to hatch from an egg and fails, and the only Pokémon the egg shape will evoke is Chansey. Then there is the mouth, which looks extremely odd; it's like a gradient and I can't even really tell if it's supposed to be open or closed.
That said, those are not the only problems. On the technical side, we have the outline on the top left (our left) of the head: there is a very conspicuous bump on it where you removed the ear, and it's mostly black and dark even though it should be the most highlighted part of the sprite. Combusken's feather crest is at the wrong angle compared to the body, which makes it look awkward, and there is an ugly cluster of black pixels near the bottom of the crest where it happens to come next to the outline. Another ugly cluster of black is near where the left arm (our right) connects to the body, between the arm and the wings.
On the stomach you tried to scratch an area where the purple lower body can be seen behind the lighter feathers of the upper body; this scratched area is all highlighted, which looks kind of odd because it should be shadowed by those feathers.
General spriting skill: 2/5. It's ambitious, I'll give you that, but you couldn't really handle it well enough; those clusters of black are just really ugly, the feather crest looks wrong, and there is that terrible bumpy scratch outline.
Originality and composition: 2/3. It's original and amusing, but needs more Clefable to be a balanced splice.
Coloring: 1/2. The colors are not precisely ugly, but it just looks really monochromatic - light purple and darker purple, with absolutely no other colors to break it up.
Total: 5/10
Mewtwo
This is one of those sprites that doesn't look too bad when you just glance at it, but when you give it a good look and zoom in, it's riddled with problems. First of all, you forgot to recolor some bits of outline - there is still brown in the near wing and left (our right) hind leg's talons, and red in the talons on the right front leg (our left), in addition to some random gray pixels in that leg and the outlines of some facial features being bluish-gray. These are really elementary mistakes.
The wings have their own glaring problem, which is that they're lighter than the body - I'm guessing you recolored the Pidgeotto first and then pasted the wing on. The bad thing about doing that is that you can then find out that the coloring in parts that are supposed to be connected to one another doesn't match. It's fine for the inside of the wings to be lighter, but the 'arm' portion should be the same color as the body it is connected to, and the fact it isn't makes the wing look all the more pasted on. To make matters worse, the feathers closest to the body have a couple of random highlighted pixels, leftovers from Pidgeotto, which make no sense here as that part of the wing should be shadowed by the body. Those pixels, as it happens, really stand out even without zooming in. The least you could do is fix faults that are conspicuous even when viewing the sprite at normal size.
Then there are the legs, which, I'm sorry to say, are just not well done. Your attempts to narrow them so that the talons fit on seem really half-hearted, especially on the raised front leg, which looks like it's made of rubber and has no outline on the underside of it. In general you hardly even seem to attempt to blend the talons properly with the legs - see especially the right hind leg (our left), where there is a black outline between them. The other hind leg has a random patch of light purple, which was originally the light blue on Luxray's leg, but on this sprite it looks like demented highlighting gone horribly wrong thanks to the way the talons randomly add a shadow above them. Finally, the talons bear very strong signs of having been taken off different Pokémon originally thanks to conspicuous style differences such as the number of shades they use and whether their outline is all black or partly gray.
All in all this sprite really needs editing to look properly like one whole.
General spriting skill: 1/5. The novice mistakes like failing to recolor all the outlines and add outlines when narrowing the legs are really dragging you down here. It has some ambition to it, but fails to deliver.
Originality and composition: 2/3. Gryphons are not the epitome of original in themselves, but they have the advantage that there are so many ways to make them that no two are the same. It's reasonably well composed, too; it's just the execution that butchers it.
Coloring: 1/2. It's not eye-hurting or anything, but the body looks a bit monochromatic despite the head having more colors to it, and the yellow of the ears doesn't go so well with that purple.
Total: 4/10
Treechu
I giggled when I saw this. It's a hilarious, surprisingly well-executed, ambitious splice; good job.
It is not without its problems, however. Most noticeable to me is that the outline on the top left of the head is rather odd; it is in the most highlighted part of the sprite but nonetheless there are some random dark pixels in the middle of the highlighted outline. The shading near the top of the head does not quite imply the right shape, and the nose shadow right now makes it look like a huge dent - it would have to be a bit further to the right to work as the shadow of the bridge of the nose. Finally, the mouth is large enough here to make it really warrant a bit of shading. (Also, the eyes are very asymmetrical, but I'll forgive you that since it makes it funnier.)
That said, most of the shading is pretty good and most of the scratch editing looks great, so kudos on that.
General spriting skill: 4/5. While it has those problems, those are more advanced mistakes than those many other entrants are making, and overall the sprite has a great deal of scratch editing and so on which is mostly pulled off well.
Originality and composition: 3/3. It is one of the more hilarious sprites ever created, mixes two extremely unlikely Pokémon and does it well.
Coloring: 2/2. It's a nice purple, it works, and the general simplicity of it coupled with the red mouth stops it from seeming too monochromatic, avoiding one of the recurring problems with a lot of the entries here.
Total: 9/10
Skroy Horitz
I actually took quite a liking to this when I saw it. I especially like how you blended the legs. It's a surprisingly successful splice of two Pokémon of wildly different sizes, and you deserve credit for that.
Giving it a better look and zooming in, however, reveals some strange problems. First of all, there are the monocolor outlines of the yellow Absol parts. I'm still wondering what possessed you to do that. The shading on the legs is rather odd and makes them look kind of striped, since the outlines of the shadows don't entirely follow the contours of the legs. Then there is the dark gray - both on the stomach near the neck fur and as the mask on its face - which is no longer sufficiently dark to distinguish itself from the purple and thus looks quite odd. The neck fur itself could use more shading under the head. The furred aura-sensor things look rather wildly different in style from one another and the right one (our left) has no shading whatsoever, while the left one does not look properly attached to the head. Finally, you have one bit of gray outline on the right leg (our left).
General spriting skill: 2/5. While it does have the aforementioned problems, it's reasonably ambitious in splicing a big Pokémon with a small one and succeeds fairly well at it, creating a creature that looks pretty cool in its own right. There's decently done scratching and good blending. However, as I said, there are those problems and they do drag you down quite a bit. I'd want to give you more, but I really can't give you a three when you've got monocolored outlines.
Originality and composition: 3/3. Riolu and Absol are interesting picks and you put it together pretty well.
Coloring: 2/2. I'm not a fan of Skuntank's colors in themselves, but you got them to look reasonably good on it.
Total: 7/10
Dr Frank
What is most painful about this is that Giratina and Drapion actually could look good spliced together: Giratina's golden parts are actually reasonably similar to Drapion's segments. I tried coloring Giratina's golden parts with Drapion's darker purple; it looked pretty cool. I also tried coloring Giratina's red parts with Drapion's blue, and that looked pretty good too. The reason this does not look good is that you didn't really care and thus just threw together a basic headswap.
Your big mistake here as you're trying to make something simple and easy for the challenge is using a legendary Pokémon. Legendaries tend to be shaded with more shades than ordinary Pokémon. It is also unfortunate that the other Pokémon you picked was Drapion, which has some of the darkest, most solid and clear-cut outlines of all Pokémon sprites. When you try to transfer Drapion's colors onto Giratina, Giratina has multiple shades in its outline, and since it has black only on the very darkest parts of it, you waste Drapion's other dark outline shade on the still-dark-but-slightly-less-so parts of Giratina's outline. The rest of its outline gets made up of much lighter colors which make it look strangely faded and very, very unlike Drapion's head - it might as well be recolored to some other Pokémon's colors, for all the stylistic consistency it achieves.
To boot, some of the outlines from the golden parts are missing, and the red and gold look pretty awful on it. You made an attempt to add a blue splotch to the tail, but there is no editing around it to make it look like a real feature of Giratina's body, making the end result look like you just sneezed and put that there by accident. You would have been much better off taking Giratina's tail off and adding Drapion's instead.
General spriting skill: 1/5. It's a headswap with one part of the body recolored; what skill is there to it? There are no glaring mistakes besides the wildly different styles of Drapion and the recolored Giratina body, but that's more because you didn't do much of anything you could have screwed up with.
Originality and composition: 0/3. It's a headswap; you could never get much for this. There does not appear to be much thought to it.
Coloring: 0/2. The recoloring is not done properly to make the style look good, and you really should have recolored the rest of Giratina instead of leaving the yellow and red parts.
Total: 1/10
SethGrey
My first thought when I saw this was "What's with the antennae?" Either you decide it shouldn't have them, in which case you need to erase where they sprout from the head too, or you decide it should have them, in which case you can't cut them off where they extend past the head.
But even though that's my first thought, that's sadly not the largest problem with this. Nothing about it is done well, to be honest; it's too much Butterfree and too little Beedrill/Ekans, the color is kind of eye-hurting, the Beedrill arms are copy-flipped and don't look like they're attached at the same place in addition to having a dark gray instead of black that makes them look really odd, the Ekans tail has seriously odd shading (partly thanks to being rotated and not reshaded), and the outlines have random gray and even brown pixels all over them.
General spriting skill: 0/5. You make practically every mistake in the book aside from saving it as a JPEG, and there are no real redeeming features that are done well. :/
Originality and composition: 0/3. Beedrill/Butterfree is pretty much a splicing cliché, and the Ekans tail, rather than making it fresh, just appears out of nowhere. There needs to be more Beedrill than just the arms in a proper Beedrill splice, and if the Ekans was meant to be part of the sprite as well, that needs to be in there more, too.
Coloring: 0/2. It's kind of eye-hurting and then there are those gray/brown outlines and the gray Beedrill arms and so on.
Total: 0/10
turbler
Automatic first thing I notice about this: it's saved as a JPEG. You just do not do that with sprites. I've judged sprite contests before where saving as a JPEG was an auto-zero, but I don't need to be able to auto-zero this since it is unfortunately quite bad without it.
First of all, it is obvious that you copied the sprite off the Internet, it had a black background, and you erased it with a Photoshop tool that had anti-aliasing on (another absolute no-no in any dealings with sprites). Or at least that's the only explanation I can think of for the randomly faded outlines. Then there's the part where the absolute only thing remotely Aipom about it is the hand pasted onto the tail, while the tail has been poorly recolored without recoloring the outlines. Well, okay, and the color being a slightly different purple with the inside of the ears yellow. Then I'm still puzzling over how you managed to add that lighter outline between the base and shadow colors. What is not wrong with it? This is not how you make a splice.
General spriting skill: 0/5. You break just about every elementary spriting rule there is. Save copy-flipping, because there is only one part actually spliced onto it.
Originality and composition: 0/3. While it's not "unoriginal", it's just a Grumpig with an Aipom hand added onto its tail and poorly recolored into Aipom's colors.
Coloring: 0/2. It wouldn't be a bad purple if it weren't for the poor recoloring job and those faded outlines that make it look like some sort of a ghost.
Total: 0/10
This means...
- Team Kanto has Notoriously Unknown (0 for not sending an entry), RandomTyphoon (5), Dr Frank (1) and turbler (0) for a total of 6 points
- Team Johto has SethGrey (0), Mewtwo (4), Flying Bread (0 for not sending an entry) and Treechu (9) for a total of 13 points
- Team Hoenn has Jack_the_White (0 for not sending an entry), Animorph (0 for not sending an entry), Flareth (0 for not sending an entry) and Slartibartfast (3) for a total of 3 points
- and Team Sinnoh has Flora and Ashes (6), Minkow (0 for not sending an entry), Skroy Horitz (7) and Blastoise428 (3) for a total of 16 points, winning this challenge and thus gaining immunity.
Alabaster had unfortunately left before I finished, so he will have to continue the game when he is back.
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Mewtwo
Mage of Blood
- Pronoun
- she
Re: TCOD Survivor (FIRST CHALLENGE UP)
4/10. Ah well. I tried! Thanks for the C&CC (even if it was a for a contest, but.) Butterfree!
Mewtwo
This is one of those sprites that doesn't look too bad when you just glance at it, but when you give it a good look and zoom in, it's riddled with problems. First of all, you forgot to recolor some bits of outline - there is still brown in the near wing and left (our right) hind leg's talons, and red in the talons on the right front leg (our left), in addition to some random gray pixels in that leg and the outlines of some facial features being bluish-gray. These are really elementary mistakes.
The wings have their own glaring problem, which is that they're lighter than the body - I'm guessing you recolored the Pidgeotto first and then pasted the wing on. The bad thing about doing that is that you can then find out that the coloring in parts that are supposed to be connected to one another doesn't match. It's fine for the inside of the wings to be lighter, but the 'arm' portion should be the same color as the body it is connected to, and the fact it isn't makes the wing look all the more pasted on. To make matters worse, the feathers closest to the body have a couple of random highlighted pixels, leftovers from Pidgeotto, which make no sense here as that part of the wing should be shadowed by the body. Those pixels, as it happens, really stand out even without zooming in. The least you could do is fix faults that are conspicuous even when viewing the sprite at normal size.
Then there are the legs, which, I'm sorry to say, are just not well done. Your attempts to narrow them so that the talons fit on seem really half-hearted, especially on the raised front leg, which looks like it's made of rubber and has no outline on the underside of it. In general you hardly even seem to attempt to blend the talons properly with the legs - see especially the right hind leg (our left), where there is a black outline between them. The other hind leg has a random patch of light purple, which was originally the light blue on Luxray's leg, but on this sprite it looks like demented highlighting gone horribly wrong thanks to the way the talons randomly add a shadow above them. Finally, the talons bear very strong signs of having been taken off different Pokémon originally thanks to conspicuous style differences such as the number of shades they use and whether their outline is all black or partly gray.
All in all this sprite really needs editing to look properly like one whole.
General spriting skill: 1/5. The novice mistakes like failing to recolor all the outlines and add outlines when narrowing the legs are really dragging you down here. It has some ambition to it, but fails to deliver.
Originality and composition: 2/3. Gryphons are not the epitome of original in themselves, but they have the advantage that there are so many ways to make them that no two are the same. It's reasonably well composed, too; it's just the execution that butchers it.
Coloring: 1/2. It's not eye-hurting or anything, but the body looks a bit monochromatic despite the head having more colors to it, and the yellow of the ears doesn't go so well with that purple.
Total: 4/10
4/10. Ah well. I tried! Thanks for the C&CC (even if it was a for a contest, but.) Butterfree!
Skroy
Eh... =P
Re: TCOD Survivor (FIRST CHALLENGE UP)
Well, for my first official splice, a 7/10 is pretty good— even if it was sort of rushed (note to self: analyze sprite more thoroughly next time).
Skroy Horitz
I actually took quite a liking to this when I saw it. I especially like how you blended the legs. It's a surprisingly successful splice of two Pokémon of wildly different sizes, and you deserve credit for that.
Giving it a better look and zooming in, however, reveals some strange problems. First of all, there are the monocolor outlines of the yellow Absol parts. I'm still wondering what possessed you to do that. The shading on the legs is rather odd and makes them look kind of striped, since the outlines of the shadows don't entirely follow the contours of the legs. Then there is the dark gray - both on the stomach near the neck fur and as the mask on its face - which is no longer sufficiently dark to distinguish itself from the purple and thus looks quite odd. The neck fur itself could use more shading under the head. The furred aura-sensor things look rather wildly different in style from one another and the right one (our left) has no shading whatsoever, while the left one does not look properly attached to the head. Finally, you have one bit of gray outline on the right leg (our left).
General spriting skill: 2/5. While it does have the aforementioned problems, it's reasonably ambitious in splicing a big Pokémon with a small one and succeeds fairly well at it, creating a creature that looks pretty cool in its own right. There's decently done scratching and good blending. However, as I said, there are those problems and they do drag you down quite a bit. I'd want to give you more, but I really can't give you a three when you've got monocolored outlines.
Originality and composition: 3/3. Riolu and Absol are interesting picks and you put it together pretty well.
Coloring: 2/2. I'm not a fan of Skuntank's colors in themselves, but you got them to look reasonably good on it.
Total: 7/10
Well, for my first official splice, a 7/10 is pretty good— even if it was sort of rushed (note to self: analyze sprite more thoroughly next time).
Slartibartfast
The word 'Nerd' is a compliment.
turbler
New member
Re: TCOD Survivor (FIRST CHALLENGE UP)
I'm sorry guyss... Spriting isn't my forte. especially on busy portions of the week. I will do my best to make it up to team Kanto on the next challenge. It'll be summer (or close) by then so I'll have all the time in the world. Sorry about this challenge :(
I'm sorry guyss... Spriting isn't my forte. especially on busy portions of the week. I will do my best to make it up to team Kanto on the next challenge. It'll be summer (or close) by then so I'll have all the time in the world. Sorry about this challenge :(
Ether's Bane
future Singaporean
- Pronoun
- he
Re: TCOD Survivor (FIRST CHALLENGE UP)
To confirm:
TEAM SINNOH WINS IMMUNITY!
That means F&A, Minkow, Skroy, and Blastoise cannot be voted off. And how do you vote, you ask? Well, just PM me your vote. You may not vote off anyone with immunity. Oh, and many, many thanks to Butterfree for judging.Butterfree. Did. Something. For. Li'l. Ol' Me. Whoa. My. Fucking. God.
I didn't reveal this before to keep you in the dark at first, but I will reveal it now.
As a punishment for coming in last, Team Hoenn will not be allowed to vote at Tribal Council. (Tribal Council is the voting period.)
Tribal Council ends on Friday, June 26 at 7:30 PM HKT. (That's 11:30 AM GMT, 7:30 AM EST, and 4:30 AM PST.)
I'm sorry for the delay; my power went out just as I was judging the last sprite and I lost the whole thing, forcing me to then retype it all.
VICIOUSNESS ALERT! Yes, I am mean. :( Sorry.
How my grading works: /5 for general spriting skill (i.e. how well you grasp the basic rules of spriting and how well you scratch, shade, outline and so on), /3 for originality and composition (i.e. the Pokémon you use and which parts you put where), and /2 for coloring (i.e. how well the colors were picked, whether they're eye-hurting, how well they suit the Pokémon and generally how good the final outcome looks).
Slartibartfast
This doesn't have a lot of technical problems, but unfortunately that is mostly because there is so very little to it in general - it is not very interesting, not very ambitious, and not even very purple. I can forgive the lack of purple, since the rules technically only seem to require you to recolor in the colors of a Pokémon that is purple (which one could consider Mewtwo to be) rather than specifically recoloring it purple, but still, in this challenge, it stands out very oddly to see something that's just Mewtwo's gray.
In general Mew/Mewtwo splices are overdone, and when people do them, this is generally how, barring that the slightly more ambitious spriters tend not to be satisfied with just a headswap and therefore try to scratch in something resembling Mewtwo's tail. It's boring, and while the head is decently spliced on, that doesn't say much about your abilities as a spriter.
You also neglected to consider that Mew and Mewtwo have slightly different shading styles, and thus Mew's body looks overall "softer" than Mewtwo's head in this splice, but it's not glaringly noticeable, I suppose.
General spriting skill: 2/5. While there is little in the way of mistakes, per se, it is simply not ambitious enough to show a lot of skill. This is a contest, guys! You're supposed to be showing off the best you can do!
Originality and composition: 0/3. This is about the most straightforward thing one could think of for this contest: take a very well-known purple Pokémon, slap its head onto its counterpart, and then recolor it.
Coloring: 1/2. While the color isn't bad in itself, in addition to not actually being purple, it's all just one color - rather dull.
Total: 3/10
Flora and Ashes
This is quite cute and not too badly put together, if rather small and simple. I think the colors are the worst thing about it, really; that purple and blue really don't look good together, at least not on this, and as I look at it one of the first thoughts to strike me is how much better it would look in Meowth's colors. The lack of Meowth's colors also gives it a second problem, which is that it, well, needs more Meowth. It's not a very balanced splice this way; it would have been nice to add the whiskers or something.
Your technical problems are firstly that the charm is off-center, and secondly that you recolored the light brown "transition color" between the cream and brown on Meowth's tail to a light blue which in the new color scheme actually contrasts more with the purple than the darker blue - instead of the softening gradient effect the lighter color had on the original Meowth sprite, it ends up looking kind of like it has a light blue rubber band around its tail. I also have an issue with where the pink inside the left ear (our right) is attached to the head - there is this sharp corner of light lavender pixels that could really be blended better with the ear by putting a darker pixel or two there.
General spriting skill: 3/5. Again, there aren't a lot of serious mistakes, but that is largely because it's not a particularly ambitious sprite - it's a purple Pichu with a couple of Meowth parts pasted onto it. If you had gone with something that showed off more skill, I could probably have given you a 4.
Originality and composition: 2/3. Though it's not the most original idea in the world, it's not by any means unoriginal either. The main problem is just the need for more Meowth in it to balance the splice, plus that I at least personally think the charm looks too big for Pichu's head and that it would have been better if you'd scratched a new one.
Coloring: 1/2. It's not that it's bad per se, but the colors don't look very good together like this and when my first thought about a splice entered in a purple challenge is that it would look so much better if it weren't purple, there is a problem.
Total: 6/10
Blastoise428
You pretty much have the opposite problem from the previous two - while it's an amusing idea and reasonably ambitious (splicing two Pokémon with drastically different body proportions), the execution really butchers it.
What happened to the shading on Chansey's outlines, first of all? Making the outlines all black is a big no-no. The beak looks kind of flat and not really attached to the face; it worked on Noctowl because the rest of it was brown, but when you've got one little brown/cream object in the middle of purple, you can't really get away with a complete lack of shading on both the object itself and its outlines. The patterns on the egg pouch are off-center and clearly copy-pastes of the same dark spot from Noctowl. The feet are also obviously both the same foot pasted on twice, and what's worse, the right one, which should be behind the left, actually appears in front of it because you pasted it on afterwards. There is a random dark pixel in the outline of the "eyebrows" (you might have wanted to make them more eyebrowish, by the way; they're a bit too high up here for them to look like eyebrows, and it is much funnier if they are taken as eyebrows) that worked on the original Noctowl sprite because that was where the line intersected with the outline of the head but absolutely does not work here.
And sadly, the colors are frankly terrible; the purple is eye-hurtingly bright, purple and brown are just about the last two colors you should mix, and the random Chansey red on the head flaps sticks out like a sore thumb. You have the same problem there as Flora and Ashes, by the way: the medium pink there, the transition color into the light pink on Chansey's body, contrasts more harshly with the purple of the body than the red does.
General spriting skill: 0/5. There are just so many elementary mistakes, like the copy-paste feet and the all-black outlines, and so little (well, basically nothing) I could point to as being done right. :/
Originality and composition: 3/3. The concept is pretty original and potentially hilarious and both Pokémon are easily recognizable in it.
Coloring: 0/2. The purple is too bright and goes horribly with Noctowl's brown. And what's with those little teal pixels in the eyes and feet?
Total: 3/10
RandomTyphoon
This is both hilarious and disturbing, but I didn't realize what the other Pokémon in the splice was until I noticed Clefable's wings. Why didn't you keep the ears or curl? Right now it looks like some sort of an eldritch abomination born when a Combusken is trying to hatch from an egg and fails, and the only Pokémon the egg shape will evoke is Chansey. Then there is the mouth, which looks extremely odd; it's like a gradient and I can't even really tell if it's supposed to be open or closed.
That said, those are not the only problems. On the technical side, we have the outline on the top left (our left) of the head: there is a very conspicuous bump on it where you removed the ear, and it's mostly black and dark even though it should be the most highlighted part of the sprite. Combusken's feather crest is at the wrong angle compared to the body, which makes it look awkward, and there is an ugly cluster of black pixels near the bottom of the crest where it happens to come next to the outline. Another ugly cluster of black is near where the left arm (our right) connects to the body, between the arm and the wings.
On the stomach you tried to scratch an area where the purple lower body can be seen behind the lighter feathers of the upper body; this scratched area is all highlighted, which looks kind of odd because it should be shadowed by those feathers.
General spriting skill: 2/5. It's ambitious, I'll give you that, but you couldn't really handle it well enough; those clusters of black are just really ugly, the feather crest looks wrong, and there is that terrible bumpy scratch outline.
Originality and composition: 2/3. It's original and amusing, but needs more Clefable to be a balanced splice.
Coloring: 1/2. The colors are not precisely ugly, but it just looks really monochromatic - light purple and darker purple, with absolutely no other colors to break it up.
Total: 5/10
Mewtwo
This is one of those sprites that doesn't look too bad when you just glance at it, but when you give it a good look and zoom in, it's riddled with problems. First of all, you forgot to recolor some bits of outline - there is still brown in the near wing and left (our right) hind leg's talons, and red in the talons on the right front leg (our left), in addition to some random gray pixels in that leg and the outlines of some facial features being bluish-gray. These are really elementary mistakes.
The wings have their own glaring problem, which is that they're lighter than the body - I'm guessing you recolored the Pidgeotto first and then pasted the wing on. The bad thing about doing that is that you can then find out that the coloring in parts that are supposed to be connected to one another doesn't match. It's fine for the inside of the wings to be lighter, but the 'arm' portion should be the same color as the body it is connected to, and the fact it isn't makes the wing look all the more pasted on. To make matters worse, the feathers closest to the body have a couple of random highlighted pixels, leftovers from Pidgeotto, which make no sense here as that part of the wing should be shadowed by the body. Those pixels, as it happens, really stand out even without zooming in. The least you could do is fix faults that are conspicuous even when viewing the sprite at normal size.
Then there are the legs, which, I'm sorry to say, are just not well done. Your attempts to narrow them so that the talons fit on seem really half-hearted, especially on the raised front leg, which looks like it's made of rubber and has no outline on the underside of it. In general you hardly even seem to attempt to blend the talons properly with the legs - see especially the right hind leg (our left), where there is a black outline between them. The other hind leg has a random patch of light purple, which was originally the light blue on Luxray's leg, but on this sprite it looks like demented highlighting gone horribly wrong thanks to the way the talons randomly add a shadow above them. Finally, the talons bear very strong signs of having been taken off different Pokémon originally thanks to conspicuous style differences such as the number of shades they use and whether their outline is all black or partly gray.
All in all this sprite really needs editing to look properly like one whole.
General spriting skill: 1/5. The novice mistakes like failing to recolor all the outlines and add outlines when narrowing the legs are really dragging you down here. It has some ambition to it, but fails to deliver.
Originality and composition: 2/3. Gryphons are not the epitome of original in themselves, but they have the advantage that there are so many ways to make them that no two are the same. It's reasonably well composed, too; it's just the execution that butchers it.
Coloring: 1/2. It's not eye-hurting or anything, but the body looks a bit monochromatic despite the head having more colors to it, and the yellow of the ears doesn't go so well with that purple.
Total: 4/10
Treechu
I giggled when I saw this. It's a hilarious, surprisingly well-executed, ambitious splice; good job.
It is not without its problems, however. Most noticeable to me is that the outline on the top left of the head is rather odd; it is in the most highlighted part of the sprite but nonetheless there are some random dark pixels in the middle of the highlighted outline. The shading near the top of the head does not quite imply the right shape, and the nose shadow right now makes it look like a huge dent - it would have to be a bit further to the right to work as the shadow of the bridge of the nose. Finally, the mouth is large enough here to make it really warrant a bit of shading. (Also, the eyes are very asymmetrical, but I'll forgive you that since it makes it funnier.)
That said, most of the shading is pretty good and most of the scratch editing looks great, so kudos on that.
General spriting skill: 4/5. While it has those problems, those are more advanced mistakes than those many other entrants are making, and overall the sprite has a great deal of scratch editing and so on which is mostly pulled off well.
Originality and composition: 3/3. It is one of the more hilarious sprites ever created, mixes two extremely unlikely Pokémon and does it well.
Coloring: 2/2. It's a nice purple, it works, and the general simplicity of it coupled with the red mouth stops it from seeming too monochromatic, avoiding one of the recurring problems with a lot of the entries here.
Total: 9/10
Skroy Horitz
I actually took quite a liking to this when I saw it. I especially like how you blended the legs. It's a surprisingly successful splice of two Pokémon of wildly different sizes, and you deserve credit for that.
Giving it a better look and zooming in, however, reveals some strange problems. First of all, there are the monocolor outlines of the yellow Absol parts. I'm still wondering what possessed you to do that. The shading on the legs is rather odd and makes them look kind of striped, since the outlines of the shadows don't entirely follow the contours of the legs. Then there is the dark gray - both on the stomach near the neck fur and as the mask on its face - which is no longer sufficiently dark to distinguish itself from the purple and thus looks quite odd. The neck fur itself could use more shading under the head. The furred aura-sensor things look rather wildly different in style from one another and the right one (our left) has no shading whatsoever, while the left one does not look properly attached to the head. Finally, you have one bit of gray outline on the right leg (our left).
General spriting skill: 2/5. While it does have the aforementioned problems, it's reasonably ambitious in splicing a big Pokémon with a small one and succeeds fairly well at it, creating a creature that looks pretty cool in its own right. There's decently done scratching and good blending. However, as I said, there are those problems and they do drag you down quite a bit. I'd want to give you more, but I really can't give you a three when you've got monocolored outlines.
Originality and composition: 3/3. Riolu and Absol are interesting picks and you put it together pretty well.
Coloring: 2/2. I'm not a fan of Skuntank's colors in themselves, but you got them to look reasonably good on it.
Total: 7/10
Dr Frank
What is most painful about this is that Giratina and Drapion actually could look good spliced together: Giratina's golden parts are actually reasonably similar to Drapion's segments. I tried coloring Giratina's golden parts with Drapion's darker purple; it looked pretty cool. I also tried coloring Giratina's red parts with Drapion's blue, and that looked pretty good too. The reason this does not look good is that you didn't really care and thus just threw together a basic headswap.
Your big mistake here as you're trying to make something simple and easy for the challenge is using a legendary Pokémon. Legendaries tend to be shaded with more shades than ordinary Pokémon. It is also unfortunate that the other Pokémon you picked was Drapion, which has some of the darkest, most solid and clear-cut outlines of all Pokémon sprites. When you try to transfer Drapion's colors onto Giratina, Giratina has multiple shades in its outline, and since it has black only on the very darkest parts of it, you waste Drapion's other dark outline shade on the still-dark-but-slightly-less-so parts of Giratina's outline. The rest of its outline gets made up of much lighter colors which make it look strangely faded and very, very unlike Drapion's head - it might as well be recolored to some other Pokémon's colors, for all the stylistic consistency it achieves.
To boot, some of the outlines from the golden parts are missing, and the red and gold look pretty awful on it. You made an attempt to add a blue splotch to the tail, but there is no editing around it to make it look like a real feature of Giratina's body, making the end result look like you just sneezed and put that there by accident. You would have been much better off taking Giratina's tail off and adding Drapion's instead.
General spriting skill: 1/5. It's a headswap with one part of the body recolored; what skill is there to it? There are no glaring mistakes besides the wildly different styles of Drapion and the recolored Giratina body, but that's more because you didn't do much of anything you could have screwed up with.
Originality and composition: 0/3. It's a headswap; you could never get much for this. There does not appear to be much thought to it.
Coloring: 0/2. The recoloring is not done properly to make the style look good, and you really should have recolored the rest of Giratina instead of leaving the yellow and red parts.
Total: 1/10
SethGrey
My first thought when I saw this was "What's with the antennae?" Either you decide it shouldn't have them, in which case you need to erase where they sprout from the head too, or you decide it should have them, in which case you can't cut them off where they extend past the head.
But even though that's my first thought, that's sadly not the largest problem with this. Nothing about it is done well, to be honest; it's too much Butterfree and too little Beedrill/Ekans, the color is kind of eye-hurting, the Beedrill arms are copy-flipped and don't look like they're attached at the same place in addition to having a dark gray instead of black that makes them look really odd, the Ekans tail has seriously odd shading (partly thanks to being rotated and not reshaded), and the outlines have random gray and even brown pixels all over them.
General spriting skill: 0/5. You make practically every mistake in the book aside from saving it as a JPEG, and there are no real redeeming features that are done well. :/
Originality and composition: 0/3. Beedrill/Butterfree is pretty much a splicing cliché, and the Ekans tail, rather than making it fresh, just appears out of nowhere. There needs to be more Beedrill than just the arms in a proper Beedrill splice, and if the Ekans was meant to be part of the sprite as well, that needs to be in there more, too.
Coloring: 0/2. It's kind of eye-hurting and then there are those gray/brown outlines and the gray Beedrill arms and so on.
Total: 0/10
turbler
Automatic first thing I notice about this: it's saved as a JPEG. You just do not do that with sprites. I've judged sprite contests before where saving as a JPEG was an auto-zero, but I don't need to be able to auto-zero this since it is unfortunately quite bad without it.
First of all, it is obvious that you copied the sprite off the Internet, it had a black background, and you erased it with a Photoshop tool that had anti-aliasing on (another absolute no-no in any dealings with sprites). Or at least that's the only explanation I can think of for the randomly faded outlines. Then there's the part where the absolute only thing remotely Aipom about it is the hand pasted onto the tail, while the tail has been poorly recolored without recoloring the outlines. Well, okay, and the color being a slightly different purple with the inside of the ears yellow. Then I'm still puzzling over how you managed to add that lighter outline between the base and shadow colors. What is not wrong with it? This is not how you make a splice.
General spriting skill: 0/5. You break just about every elementary spriting rule there is. Save copy-flipping, because there is only one part actually spliced onto it.
Originality and composition: 0/3. While it's not "unoriginal", it's just a Grumpig with an Aipom hand added onto its tail and poorly recolored into Aipom's colors.
Coloring: 0/2. It wouldn't be a bad purple if it weren't for the poor recoloring job and those faded outlines that make it look like some sort of a ghost.
Total: 0/10
This means...
- Team Kanto has Notoriously Unknown (0 for not sending an entry), RandomTyphoon (5), Dr Frank (1) and turbler (0) for a total of 6 points
- Team Johto has SethGrey (0), Mewtwo (4), Flying Bread (0 for not sending an entry) and Treechu (9) for a total of 13 points
- Team Hoenn has Jack_the_White (0 for not sending an entry), Animorph (0 for not sending an entry), Flareth (0 for not sending an entry) and Slartibartfast (3) for a total of 3 points
- and Team Sinnoh has Flora and Ashes (6), Minkow (0 for not sending an entry), Skroy Horitz (7) and Blastoise428 (3) for a total of 16 points, winning this challenge and thus gaining immunity.
Alabaster had unfortunately left before I finished, so he will have to continue the game when he is back.
To confirm:
TEAM SINNOH WINS IMMUNITY!
That means F&A, Minkow, Skroy, and Blastoise cannot be voted off. And how do you vote, you ask? Well, just PM me your vote. You may not vote off anyone with immunity. Oh, and many, many thanks to Butterfree for judging.
I didn't reveal this before to keep you in the dark at first, but I will reveal it now.
As a punishment for coming in last, Team Hoenn will not be allowed to vote at Tribal Council. (Tribal Council is the voting period.)
Tribal Council ends on Friday, June 26 at 7:30 PM HKT. (That's 11:30 AM GMT, 7:30 AM EST, and 4:30 AM PST.)
Skroy
Eh... =P
Re: TCOD Survivor (TRIBAL COUNCIL: VOTING OPEN)
Have you ever watched Survivor, Dr.? Or any of those reality TV shows where contestants are voted off? 'Cause it's gonna be like that, and then you could be like, "You're gonna regret this!" or something like that before walking down the {insert pathway} of shame.
(Actually, I don't watch any of those reality shows. The only show I watch that closely resembles said type of show is Total Drama Island/Action; it's a animated reality show!)
Have you ever watched Survivor, Dr.? Or any of those reality TV shows where contestants are voted off? 'Cause it's gonna be like that, and then you could be like, "You're gonna regret this!" or something like that before walking down the {insert pathway} of shame.
(Actually, I don't watch any of those reality shows. The only show I watch that closely resembles said type of show is Total Drama Island/Action; it's a animated reality show!)