• Welcome to The Cave of Dragonflies forums, where the smallest bugs live alongside the strongest dragons.

    Guests are not able to post messages or even read certain areas of the forums. Now, that's boring, don't you think? Registration, on the other hand, is simple, completely free of charge, and does not require you to give out any personal information at all. As soon as you register, you can take part in some of the happy fun things at the forums such as posting messages, voting in polls, sending private messages to people and being told that this is where we drink tea and eat cod.

    Of course I'm not forcing you to do anything if you don't want to, but seriously, what have you got to lose? Five seconds of your life?

Very dumb 'complaint' of sorts.

Status
Not open for further replies.

Vladimir Putin's LJ

your blood flows through my veins
Okay, I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but is there any way to separate the Spriting forum from the general art forum? I'm asking because every time I post something that took genuine effort I refresh the page to see someone's just updated their shitty recolouring thread or something.
 
Last edited:
For once, I agree with a complaint posted here.
I haven't updated my thread in what feels like months because I know five seconds later someone's going to post in a spriting thread and no one'll see my post.

Separation of the two would be very nice.
 
While we're at it (and I'm sure much of the spriters would agree) is there any chance of having a subforum for requests instead of them being together with ordinary threads?

Also seconding a split from the general art forum.
 
Why are the sprites and the general art together in the first place? Sprites aren't usually considered 'serious' art at all, are they? It'd be like mashing separate Fanfiction and Original Fiction forums together and expecting it all to work without a hitch. Or pokemon roleplaying and original roleplaying forums together and expecting the same thing.

Oh, wait.
 
The actual art forum has some degree of genuine talent; the spriting forum is a bunch of children who think they're cool because they know how to use MS Paint. Were I an artist who frequently posted there, I would be upset, too.

Seconding the original post.
 
Pixel art is real art. Game sprite tweaks, edits, etc are simple as hell and largely use others' work. Fuck, I could mass-do the simpler things (recolors, etc) with simple shell scripts. I don't see that much real pixel art (including 'scratch sprites') happening; I'd just rule that edits of others' art don't belong cluttering the art forum and merge the bit of honest pixel art with the main art forum. Much neater; imposes a bit of quality control that I'd think would work well.

If you're just poking around with someone else's art, you're not the artist. This holds for Game Freak's artists' sprites.

of course, it's not going to happen and I don't really care, but I figured I'd point out what could easily work well (even if it'd go over a bit badly at first)
 
Last edited:
I agree with everything that's already been posted.

Hell, I've even seen people tracing stuff off of Arkeis and Suta-Raito in the Spriting forum and saying it's their own. It pisses me off. :\
 
I agree with the OP, someone could have done the Mona Lisa of their style of drawing, only to see that it won't get as many views because of a spriting thread was posted in 5 seconds after they updated their art thread.
 
Why are the sprites and the general art together in the first place? Sprites aren't usually considered 'serious' art at all, are they? It'd be like mashing separate Fanfiction and Original Fiction forums together and expecting it all to work without a hitch. Or pokemon roleplaying and original roleplaying forums together and expecting the same thing.

Oh, wait.
...how is fanfiction posted online honestly less "serious" than original fiction posted online? :/ Neither is going to get published; both are practice-writing by amateurs; the only possible argument for separating them is that some original fiction has the potential to be published in some heavily edited form at some vague later point in the future, but even that is only because of copyright law and not because there is any actual difference between the art forms. For role-playing, where none has the chance of being published, there is absolutely no possible reason to make a distinction between that which involves Pokémon and that which does not. Fundamentally, there is absolutely no difference in any artistic sense between a work of fiction that involves species created by Game Freak and species created by evolution. To think one is automatically better than the other, or that one being relevant to one's interest does not to some degree imply the other might be as well, is nothing but senseless elitism. At least sprites and general artwork are distinguishable by something other than the arbitrary creator of parts of their subject matter.

Making the sprite forum independent of the main art forum would be a very simple matter, though honestly, if somebody is interested in seeing when you've updated your thread, why in the world would they rely on happening to see it in the "Last post" column on the main page? If I want to see when an artist updates their thread, I'll check the actual art forum regularly; I can't really see this dramatically affecting the odds that people will notice when you update, since the only way it'll attract more people is if they think the title of your thread sounds particularly interesting and happen to walk in when your particular thread is the last one posted in. But whatever floats your boat; if you want to try it, that's fine by me.

While we're at it (and I'm sure much of the spriters would agree) is there any chance of having a subforum for requests instead of them being together with ordinary threads?
Sure, can be done.

The actual art forum has some degree of genuine talent; the spriting forum is a bunch of children who think they're cool because they know how to use MS Paint. Were I an artist who frequently posted there, I would be upset, too.
Oh, come on. I'm not commenting on the quality of the sprites that happen to be posted in this forum, but I'm sick of people thinking they're cool because they say spriting inherently requires no effort. There is little to no effort in standard recoloring, yes; very little in your average thrown-together splice; but you can also make an art out of blending parts properly and scratching in between to make something that looks like a natural whole, and that can easily take a lot of time and effort. Pixel-overs done properly take hours, and scratch sprites are in no way inferior to larger drawings.

If you're going to protest with "But when they're working from other people's artwork, it's not as good as proper original art!": I would have absolutely nothing against an art thread where somebody, say, created digital art imitating photos or famous paintings, or photomanips, or whatever. It can be well done or it can be badly done, and it can be done with effort or with little effort, but denying that doing it well takes quite a bit of effort on the artist's part is silly. As long as the original artwork is attributed and not used in violation of the original artist's terms for its usage, I don't see why a person working from other material can't have their work recognized as well.

As for why scratch sprites are categorized with sprite edits and not other artwork, that would be because of sensible overlap of interests. People who make scratch sprites are more likely to also do other kinds of sprite work than drawing, and in critiquing a scratch sprite, there are all sorts of considerations that apply to pixel art in general but not to traditional art, while those aspects that apply to both traditional art and scratch sprites (anatomy and shape, coloring and shading, etc.) generally apply to some degree to at least some kinds of derivative sprite work as well.

EDIT: Sprite forum split, request shop forum made. I moved all the sprite shops on the first page of the sprite forum over; if you want me to move yours, or if you don't want yours to be a shop, feel free to PM me.

(Jesus Christ, I think there was one or two showcases on that page. o_O)
 
Last edited:
Using someone else's work as a start-off point to create your own is simply being influenced. It's a very common ideal to have an existing work, or various existing works, as guidelines for what you want to achieve with your own work.
 
FINALLY. Thank god this happened (the request forum split I mean).
And for those of you who think spriting/pixels are NOT art: pixeljoint.com. That's all I have to say.
 
I said that edits of others' sprites (this includes ones directly out of video games) aren't.

It's still art. Perhaps not original art, no, but it's still art.

FINALLY. Thank god this happened (the request forum split I mean).

What do you mean, 'finally'? You've been here less than a month, other people here have had to put up with it longer than you.
Also, thankyou Butterfree. :)
 
I never said it wasn't. I said that edits of others' sprites (this includes ones directly out of video games) aren't.
Film editing is not art. You're just pasting together scenes that other people shot, directed and acted.

Landscape painting is not art. You're just copying nature.

Films adapted from books are not art. They're just taking somebody else's story and putting it in a different medium.

Cooking is not art. You're just taking vegetables somebody else grew, meat from animals somebody else bred, spices somebody else harvested and so on and mixing them together.


You can be as choosy as you like about to what you want to apply the word "art", but you cannot honestly sit there and pretend that because somebody's artwork is made from something else that they didn't make, the artist's work is suddenly meaningless.
 
The artist's work is meaningless if they refuse to acknowledge who actually expended effort.

Sure, it's still art, but the real issue is when people claim that it's entirely theirs when it ... isn't.
 
Obviously. Have you ever met a spriter who tried to claim sprite edits as being entirely theirs? People don't specifically mention it simply because it's a given - we've all seen Game Freak's sprites and know a splice when we see one. :/
 
Your join date says July 2008. I'm quite as puzzled as you are.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom