Today i posted my first .gif but it was rejected "REASON: We're sorry to inform you that your submission does not meet our quality standards or the art needs revision for some miscellaneous reason."

so as it is my first attempt... doing it after reading about this on my own... i wanted to know how or what should i change or why it doest meet an artistic lvl.. or whatever...

its S.I. Phaser Interception

thanks.

Hey Sandman, I'm sorry your first piece got rejected. I know how discouraging that is :(

Here's the image in question, for everyone's reference:


Now, I'm not sure why it was rejected, but it may have to do with your palette. You've got over 150 colors on a piece that could easily be done with a tenth of that.

Take a look at this selection from your palette:



That's a ton of very similar colors, and that's not even all of them. The ramp extends up and down a good deal, too, I just cropped it. That's very indicative of certain tools that aren't allowed on PJ, like blur, auto-AA, etc. Dunno if you used one by accident, or just didn't know the rules, or what, but I'd try cleaning up your palette and resubmitting.

Good luck!

Edited by Hatch - 18 November 2009 at 6:05pm

In the Photoshop menu, select View -> Proof Colors -> Monitor RGB. This should give you an accurate preview for what it will ultimately look like. Also, if you use Save for Web, be sure to uncheck "Convert to sRGB" from the little pulldown menu to the right of the Preset dropdown. phew.

However, none of that would account for or fix your inflated color count. I would suggest erasing all of the stars and space to black, then converting to Indexed mode and seeing how many colors you're using. You may have to repeat this a few times, hunting down lingering pixels containing unwanted colors. Once you have your palette under control again, rebuild your stars, carefully managing your palette along the way. Be sure you have "Antialiasing" disabled on all your tools, and everything that has a "tolerance" setting should be set to zero.

If you need to add a color, convert to RGB, select a new color and draw a bit with it, then convert back to Index. IN this manner you can make sure you don't accidentally bloat your color count again, and if you do, just a few undo steps will fix it.

Photoshop is an ok tool for making pixel art, but you have to take careful steps to disable all of its advanced features.

Good luck!


Edited by Hatch - 18 November 2009 at 7:35pm

Image -> Mode -> Indexed Color.... In the dialog that brings up, select "Exact" from the "Palette" dropdown menu

Edited by Hatch - 18 November 2009 at 8:07pm

" Image -> Mode -> Indexed Color.... In the dialog that brings up, select "Exact" from the "Palette" dropdown menu": this only works if you have 256 colors at most.
There is a free color counter app that was made by PJ member DeProgrammer, search for it on the forum threads.

About your image: nice concept, but your iso can improve. The outlines are not so great, and the broken piece lighting is totally inconsistent: light comes from top right on the main piece, from the left on the broken one.
I'm no fan of the eyes color; a nicer idea would be to have a less saturated color on the 'body' and a very saturated color in the eyes.

Hope to see that in the gallery soon!