The Aywas Thread

It's always difficult to get things to read clearly at very small sizes, and those all display very clearly with a lot of detail. I feel very hungry (goes in search of a teapot cake)

Monday I received a message from well meaning Aywas staff that one pet I had submitted for "Crystal Check" (basically a way to find out if it's edited within the limits of what is allowed for that particular pet) was "too close to my source material". To me, that meant they thought I had intended to make an aywas version of some sort of copyrighted character, but eventually it turned out that they felt I had followed my photo references too closely. Personally I felt I had followed them just close enough for the edits to look like a generic horse. Well, they "line up too closely and need to be changed". 

So I took a look at my psd file (I hadn't kept the references in the ptg file thinking I was done with them). And this is what I see. (Blue is actual tracing, black is my submitted linework). I still feel like nobody can ever submit a horsey thing that looks like a horse if this is "too close". And I still feel it's utterly ridiculous as critique go. But maybe you'll see something I can't. And either way it might be best if I clm down a bit before I object to staff, again.  

 

Basically the head is not quite the same shape and definitely not the same proportions being "heavier" and shorter. The legs are not in the same positions, the limbs are not the same proportions and the hooves aren't even the same angles.

Well! that's a rather silly thing to say, especially about a line drawing. I would understand it if it was shaded like a horse but for just the line art it doesn't make much sense.
Maybe make the legs a bit more like fins so that it's more like a normal seahorse?
But it looks fine as it is to me.

Well, they haven't let me know how edited this is, so I don't know how much room there is to make changes... (the way they count edits and all, it's maximum 50% for this pet and removing the hind legs and changing front legs and head might already be too much...)

And it IS shaded as well, or that is, my version is. They haven't seen that. It's shaded like a horse, hopefully, but again, not exactly like the refs.

Well, I lost my temper entirely over this thing and reached the conclusion that I need a break from Aywas. So now I guess I have more time for Blender and modding and other paintings instead Minus the time I work and the time I'm too tired because I work...



At least this means I've finally cleaned out my Aywas folder on my website so when/if I go back, I can hopefully structure it a bit better and put files in more consistently. The only things I left for now are some freebie colourations and the images I made to show how horses do, in fact, look very similar and it's impossible to draw a horse that looks like a horse without simultaneously looking like pretty much any horse photo found online. Oh and one image that said I had withdrawn all other images in that thread (probably a hundred or so), until the site has decided whether they will actually do anything with submissions to said thread (it was posted in 2017 and they still haven't moved forward with it).

I guess there are actually more than one thing that annoys me with Aywas right now. But once they finish that re-code they're working on, I'll probably want to go back and see the "new" site. Assuming the users can actually see a difference...