I agree that the forums/guestbooks messaging is annoying when posts get merged and you don't get notified. I tend to only get back to people after someone else has posted in my guestbook, but I tend to have rather regular posts with my activity, so that's the way it is. I've never been much involved with the Forum community though now I've become a bit of a regular in the Sandbox.

I don't know about dead... but I think things are a bit slower-paced with the new system... I've always come here for the sharing and collecting of images and that hasn't changed for me... The changes took a bit of getting used to, but by remaining a regular I got used to them.

Okay... this is my last time I think... did I fix the problems? All good now?

Even submitting wallpapers made by someone else as a scan isn't really consdier proper...

Personally, I find tonnes of scans and nice images, but I don't share anything here that I didn't work on or scan myself, and that's my personal policy. It also prevents deletion due to plagarism.

If you're goign to make an attempt at wallpapers, post your first try here first and get some feedback so you won't have to worry about something getting deleted again.

I think if you walled a series/artist that doesn't even have it's own categroy you'd also get through the requirements.

*stares and stares* I'm trying to make sense of the perspective lines, but I still can't wrap my head around it... I've never been able to understand perspective and distance artistically... If everything was off-center would the perspective still be center image so I should keep that in mind?

*starts drawing perspective radius lines on her revamp but isn't sure how she'll use them*

[edit]
Here's the way I'm understanding this perspective thing... o.O

One of my problems is I'm terrible with perspective. I created the background by improvising and throwing pieces of several different images to get the effect I wanted.

As for the Color... I chose Pink for the stone-work, because pink is a major color theme within their school. I also decided to make it sunset, so I enhanced the redness in the characters to show them effected by the sunset lighting. (The uniforms are geneerally more blue, the hats more green and the hair less bright) I was a little cheap with the roses and stole them from previous Ouran vectors. They were red yes, but I color-changed them hoping they'd look more orange, but I suppose you'd want bright orange? The picture I modelled that section of the background from had blue roses, but I thought that that would be too distracting a color contrast

As for the symmetry concept... I do understand. You're ideas are actually really helpful! I think I may completely redo the background thanks to your and Rah's advice... As for the arch perspective... I think I sorta understand what you mean... I vectored it from another image and didn't really think about that... So I guess I'll have to make it from scratche and have the top of the arch visible instead of the bottom angle?

As for the fountain, it's supposed to be a round fountain (I think) but the angle and the perspect makes it look oval because you can't see the entirety of a round fountain from the side at a distance.

As for the textures... I'm not sure what you mean... I think images can look very blah without some textures... especially when objects are supposed to be stonework (Stone is not untextured even if it's smooth!) I don't know what you mean by varying the textures... I have 4 at the moment (Rose Rock Wall in the background, Granite arch, marble fountain and the textured ground - all different) So could you explain this to me?

AP = Anime Paper, another wallpaper site similar to mt - personally I like mt better.

I never claimed to be good at scenic backgrounds.
Here's my alterations based on your comments. I tried to soften the BG to make it more natural and I added shadows and definition to the water and surroundings.

I went to see the movie Click on the weekend, and it got me thinking about the concept of what would you do if you had a remote control that could stop, rewind, fast forward and adjust and translate your life? This is not a discussion of the movie, in fact, you don't even have to have seen the movie. This is a discussion of what you'd do with the power.

Personally... if I had the power to control my life with a remote control... I would constantly pause my life so that I can take things slow. I would hit the pause button so that I could travel, walk, take things slow and not worry about how much time it takes to do things. I wouldn't need to wait for subtitles to come out anymore because I'd use my life remote to translate everything for me ^_^ I would never skip things, I'd only use the power to be able to take things slower.

How about you?

I don't TRY to learn japanese from anime... it's just a handy side-effect. I once wrote down all the japanese words and phrases I knew off the top of my head and it came out to 300+ I wonder if it'd be around 400 now?
"Daijoubu?" "Hontou?" "Kirei!" "Utsukushii aozora~" "Kumo..." "KUMA!" "Hayaku!" "Nishi!"
"Are you okay?" "Really?" "Pretty!" "Beautiful Blue Sky~" "Clouds..." "BEAR!" "Quickly!" "West!"

Yeah... Sometimes someone can write romanji to me and even if I'm not 100% sure of it, I get the general gist.

I'd love to see Negima in full color
I'd love to see HanaKimi animated
I will second the Host Club manga in full color.
And Fruits Basket.

The argument is that Misa believes that the background images are just blocks of scans/source images - she implies that there is no work put into the design of the blocks behind these images for the wall.

I say thath the characters are completely extracted (with the blurred edge flaw admittedly) with the background blocks made completely originalt for the wallpaper as a design element to tie things together.

*sends Sandra off to psychotherapy to help stop Sandra from giving herself scars due to her feelings of inadequacy within the entirety of WAR*

No more cutting yourself! No more scars! *has a thing about talking about scars, cutting yourself and suicide* I'll be happy if it's a gramatical error, but it's a very disturbing one. and you didn't correct it after I pointed it out in jest, so it scares me.

No Misa, you misinterpret me. I'm saying it doesn't look like the characters squares behind the character images in the background are part of the original image the characters came from. They seem to be original accents made for the wall. Another reasoning for this is that the lines arounf the entirety of the outline of the characters are blurred but the bagrounds are crisp and use the same brushes as the entirety of the background.

I'm surprised you didn't notice that yourself. Though the blurring and transparency around the images is not a preference by all means, they are not the focal images and I don't see it as a problem in secondary character images in a wallpaper.

Personally, I disagree with Misa's assesment that the suares are part of the scan. I think it's a really nice design choice and I like it. But the focal image IS a bad choice. and the focal image extraction is bad. I personally don't think the blurring on the secondary images is bad. They're accenting and meant to be secondary to the focal image, but it may be nicer not to have so much blurring.

But definitely need better extraction on the focal image, and it would be better if it were a complete image. Frankly, I think the concept and style is awesome and if you found a better focal image and extracted it well, then I could see it being accepted.

Integra does seem a bit out of place as a character in the wall when it's a battle between Alucard and Anderson You can go two ways, make it into an Alucard and Integra wallpaper or take out Integra and find an nice picture of similar style for Anderson and find a focal image to match either of those themes. So in the end you'd have to find 2 new pictures either way to make this wall work, but it has awesome style.

*wonders why Sandra is scarred, and wonders if Sandra meant Scared*

link worked for me... It looks like a scan you addeded text to. The only thing I think that is added IS Text... The image quality is also very grainy.

It is a nice wall, but it doesn't match mt's standards. I've actually started a site for myself to post my wallpapers that don't meet mt's standards. http://free.1gbfreehost.com/terrawall/ Just because something doesn't meet mt's standard's doesn't necssarily make it bad or inusable... Look at the minitokyo policy and keep that in mind when you're making submissions. If you want, you could do the same as me and have a small offsite gallery for mt rejected walls.

Frankly... you can't make this wall better unless you vectored it, so just keep trying and keep the mt policies in mind ^_^

The only things I can think of are that the wallpaper is pixelated and the fact that it has so many filters used in it, making it able to be considered a "Filter Whore" wallpaper which is against mt policy... if it was posted in anime wallpapers, perhaps General Wallpapers would be a better category for it, because the focal characters are also filtered... In anime walls you expect to see a readily identifiable and not so distorted character image, so I think general walls would be more appropriate.

Or maybe we could delay the start of the Collab until 2 weeks or so after the rest of WAR starts to try and rally participants.

Yes, yes ^_^ I didn't expect Vector edits would be allowed, but it's the only way I could make something actually wall-worthy in the doujinshi department. I don't have a scanner and can only use a mouse and I'm TERRIBLE at dynamic poses in freestlye. Which is why I started doing vector edits to get my art concepts across when I want a dynamic pose.

And In your example Chara, the 3rd position could be how to tie it together... like maybe the BG person knows the doujinshi concept, but needs to work on the BG before he can see it, so person 3 has to tie the character in with the background and add effects and touch things up. I don't think having one person alone doing concepts and ideas is fun, all 3 members must physically put something, some work, into the wall.

But yes, those are the two ways of doing things. either you have a Doujinshi artist that is confident with CG computer art, or one that isn't (many doujinshi sketches are not clean enough for a wallpaper, at least in my opinion)

*starts imagince collab team selection*
THe Doujinshi artist is the focal member of the group and then they choose 2 people whose skills they think coincide with their art style walkure would probably go for Chara's team set-up while someone like Frosty may go for my team setup

It boils down to being who wants to participate... so far I'm still the only one down for collabs...

Quote by SandraCollaboration waller and doujinsgi master....well.....dunno :P I'm still sure that i'm gonna lose very fast But i need to try to see how good(or bad...) amd I )

For last year's collab, the UA (we did it in mt groups and not randomly drawn groups) brainstormed together and chose the scan to work from... then we assigned jobs for the collab participants (5 members) I did the Vector outline, Evo did the vector color, then there was the natural background, the city background and then all the tweaking and after effects. We handed it from person to person in succession for the jobs to be done.

And I don't see what's wrong with 1600x1200 o.o I make all my walls that size as default.

Anyway, for a 3 person collab, depending on the doujinshi artist... The artist would do the sketch, another person can clean up the sketch, and another person incorporates the background. That would be my ideal (I'd be position 2)

But if original vectors would be allowed...

Hold on, I'll upload an example...
My edited Vector - new hair, new outfit.
Original Scan

So would Doujinshi like that be allowed?

There are too many girls in this wall... it doesn't have a theme other than "cute girls" and the girls take up the entire wall with not much else... I don't like having a walpaper where my icons would cover characters.

Yeah, it's too ecchi/suggestive for the new minitokyo policy thanks to complaints from the advertisers. it's pretty cool but I'm not fond of her just being on the background... I like the character having some incorporation into the wall.

I think the collab shouldn't just be 2 people. I think the idea of having a douinshi as part of the work is really creative and could be very interesting, but limiting it to 2 people kinda ruins all the fun (I had so much fun with the Collab last year!)

I think it'll depend in the end on how many doujinshi artists are interested in participating in a wallpaper/doujinshi group competition and how many of the wallers want to participate in the collab. - I personally am caught in the middle since I just want to participate in the collab this year and my forte is vectoring, and brainstorming - I don't have wonderful effect skills and my original work isn't that impressive, though I can make impressive edits while vectoring (changing outfits and hair while keeping the same pose) alone, I surely fall short and if there were just in a wall/doujin duo I wouldn't know which end would be better for me, what the rules would be or anything like that.

I think groups of 3 or more would be my preference though...