Lenh

So...to investigate a little further there's a couple of issues with that splice: - Eliwood's eyes: There are no eyes of that shape in the set but Eliwood's seems a close match. If it's true, it violates the "only use the given set of mugs" rule. - The belts appear to be a made from scratch portion or borrowed from a mug outside the set. Since it's a whole new item on the mug it's a fairly significant addition and violates the spirit and rules of the competition ("no large made from scratch areas"). - Nose is questionable. While it looks a lot like either Harken's or Noah's, it doesn't look like either of them. Adds to suspicion it's from elsewhere or an edit went in. I'll PM and hopefully resolve these issues with the submitter, until they are consider the entry unable to win. Thanks Blue Druid for bringing it up.

Carlyle, Harken, Worried Nils, Noah Optional Theme: Mercenary ---- 2ish days to vote~

Woah! Nice to see you again, Smirks! (Awesome entry too~) I've got a last minute entry as well as a call for an extension, so voting will go up in about 14~20 hours.

Sounds fun! I'm gonna try giving it a go even though I'm starting at zero experience in the hacking department (this is a good enough excuse to try again). A couple of questions: - On poor balance/design, would something be DQ'd for being unbalanced towards the easy end (i.e. pushover units/zeroChallenge)? Balance is something I'd be willing to drop and sacrifice points for if I ran out of development time. - I take it the challenge has already started~ What if someone's previously worked/is working on something that fits the 3 chapter/complete story requirement? Can they submit that? - You'll have the Discord channel, but I take it the thread works for discussion too?

Carlyle, Harken, Worried Nils, Noah Optional Theme: Mercenary Deadline: Sunday September 17th, 2017 ---- Competition Rules:

Easy? Make Castor a troubadour, Pollux you're on your own make a simple tome edit of one of the sword lords, F!Avatar grab hatless mage, M!Avatar same thing. That'll be $2.50.

Flowerpot's wins Best in Theme and Popular Choice with 8/13 and 77% of the votes, respectively! Flowerpot will get to choose next theme and two mugs, while the runner-ups will each get to choose a mug. Kudos to all who participated~

You probably need to start with focusing your idea down to something more manageable. Figure out a specific composition you want to make (in this case who/what and an action), and what sort of style you want to make it in (I'm guessing FE, since you're here). Then open up Paint or your art program of choice and go after it. SF has a tutorial bin here. Cure's pixel art tutorial and PixelLogic($9 atm) are decent ground-up overviews of pixel art. PixelLogic has a few bits on how to sprite (blocking vs. lineart vs. hybrid vs. perspective math), but you're just as well sifting through finding pixel artists you like, trying various methods, put the work in, and find out what works well for you.

"Hierophant" is the theme.

FE6 Villager w/Earring, Roartz, Elbert, Dead-rin Optional Theme: Heirophant --- 2 days(ish) to vote!

http://www.feplanet.net/sprites-archive-battle-animations

FE6 Villager w/Earring, Roartz, Elbert, Dead-rin Optional Theme: Heirophant Deadline: Sunday August 27th, 2017 ---- Competition Rules:

Simple, but nice! The outfit and hairstyle's very cute. Personally (maybe a style choice) I would lighten or darken some edge shading as the near pig tail and collarPiece edge all aliases to a color and the other side's pigtail/collarPiece aliases to black. It looks pretty cohesive already though, so your mileage out of the edit might not be much.

Teapot's takes Best in Theme with 7/10 votes and Popular Choice with 100% favorability! She'll get to choose next theme and two mugs, each runner up will get to choose a mug. Kudos to all who participated!

His body proportion relative to his head. In the original he's pretty big and muscular and has the head and neck muscles to match. You spliced him with a medium-build medium size individual with no real alterations to match his previous bulk, so it's a little bobble-head like.

did you just assume those splice's genders/classes

Harken, Forde, Hawkeye, Franz Optional Theme: Female Cleric --- 2 days to vote!

Normal zoom (1x) is fine, most people can zoom in on their own. Most of them look okay, Garcia, Lute, and Ross have more serious body mismatches and neck issues.

Nahhhhh. Theme is optional anyways. 1 week left.

Harken, Forde, Hawkeye, Franz Optional Theme: Female Cleric Deadline: Sunday August 6th, 2017 ---- Competition Rules:

Nah, sorry, I won't be around next week so it's easiest if I cut regular. (This was a difficult set to work with as well, so kudos to the one entrant.) Blaze's sepia wins by default! He'll get to choose the details for next round.

Requests Post Requests currently closed, though I may open up one for traces/FEstylization at some point. They take about eight hours to complete (as in they take eight hours of work on average for something that fits in the hackbox area, not "oh boy I'm gonna get an eight hour turnaround!"). If you want to use one of my pre-existing mugs for something, please drop me a PM. More than likely I'm okay with it, though some are ear-marked for other projects or use.

R.I.P. my old thread due to image hosting problems (and spoiler/image tag problems, etc.). I'll be slowly rebuilding my gallery here (or trying to), and posting on blue moons as usual. Splices: Mugs: Battlesprites:

I don't have time to give my personal opinion, especially an edit, on everything. You got my one with the expectation that you'll put more effort in. - Cape colors are bad, put back in a vanilla color ramp. -Stray brown in hair - Eyebrows aren't great, splice something back in. - Eyes are flatter than they should be (lacking depth, there's not the usual level of shading in them). Splice something back in and preserve the shading. -Cape itself is pressing the body tightly while the shading says it's loosely draped. - Again, basic splice, go for some more complex variations.

Aliasing means you take a crisp line and smooth it out with darker colors to soften its edge. Done right it makes the mug more cohesive and is easier on the eyes. Done wrong or overdone it can destroy shapes and make the mug blurry and unreadable. --- - Black spots on the hair don't work. Works ok. - Stray browns on the jacket collar near the belt. Either get rid of those or incorporate that color into the rest of the jacket. Ok. - Shading on the jacket is uggs/pillow shading on the circled area in particular. Part to blame on the vanilla source, part to blame for selecting colors with a higher contrast that really accentuates it. Same could be said for the purple. Personally I don't see an improvement, you're probably better off mimicking the color values that Linus has (best off learning to shade that part appropriately). A color value is the perceived brightness of a color, even if they're different hues, say an equally bright blue or grey or purple. - Darkest brown and dark grey are very similar but underutilized as subtle color-shift shading, which aside from straight laziness or palette swapping ease would be your only reason for keeping two similar colors without just crushing them. You could really use the extra color to push depth on the jacket. - Color scheme is pasty skin, yellowy-desat brown, red-brown, blue-purple, and blue-grey? There's no real harmony in it so it looks over-busy/confused, and with so many colors a lot of them are flat, when you could have fewer with more depth/shading. An attempt was made, now it's monochromatic but most of the body colors are much darker than the head/hair. I don't know where you're pulling colors from but you're better off keeping the color value of the vanilla color you're swapping. - Bad seam /missing eyebrow Still missing, you touched the wrong eyebrow. Just look at Sain's eyebrows and copy the shading he had/splice them back in properly. - The trim on the breastplate irks me, might be b/c shading on the actual metal is flat. The trim got worse with a downgrade from 3 levels of shading to 2, and while there's a drop shadow on the breastplate now it still seems pretty flat.. --- Since it seems you are focused more on cleanup I'll tackle it once, and hope you can pull something from it. I mostly referenced the vanilla sprites to reshade what got destroyed on the face sections, and swapped colors around and went free on the body. Clean-up is one of the easier things but it's something that needs to be done. | -> - Don't alter any color on the skintone ramp unless you know what you're doing. I have a feeling you shared the hair color with a skintone and then altered the hair color, which altered the face shading. - I was too lazy to alter Linus' coat. With vanilla there are easily spliceable and good things and there's bad, where you'll have a lot of work to put in before they can be used elsewhere/put up to standard. Linus' coat, things with low color-counts, and quite a few FE6 mugs are in that category. -This doesn't solve the issue with the breastplate being an illogical design point, and there's anatomical wonkiness that's kind of downplayed because you have the bigger elephant of the breastplate there, but eh. -You're frozen into the odd color scheme because of the shared colors between them, hair and collar is forced b/c it shares with skintone, belt/armor/jacket/trim are forced together because they're dependent on one another and the jacket is dependent on the outline color. The arrangement/color crushing is great for freehand work but much more difficult to deal with when you're playing with splices. -I think in general you have an issue with pulling/replacing the right colors for your splices. Again, match your new color value to the original color value you're replacing.