Hi GreenRaven,

Thank you very much for the effort you have put into this.

I'm visiting this site a few months now and for me the
real benefit is the WIP forum. That is the reason I
have registered and ask for help with my pixels.

Personally I never cared for the gallery, but I do
realize that this is a really important part of this
website. Submitting to the gallery is among other
things part of increasing your level and therefore
unlock some of the other parts of the board.

The most important rule should be the ripping.
When you take something and put your name
on it without doing anything it is wrong. Period!
BUT, if someone modifies something (and makes
a reference to it) I'm perfectly fine with that.
Look at the parody that Duchamp made when
he drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

Then there is the thing about Lil' Dudes. Don't
get me wrong. I'm not a fan of them. But I do
think that ANYTHING that motivates, stimulates
or inspires to lift up the mouse or tablet to
make some pixels should be allowed to have
a place on the board. Maybe special sections
for wees, lildudes, fanbased art?

There is a rating/voting system attached to
submitting pieces to the gallery. Personally I
would open up this section to everybody.
So anybody can have their vote if something
is worthwhile to be added to the gallery,
because I do realize and support  such
a voting mechanism to uphold some quality.
Level 2 and upward could maybe have
a stronger vote?!?

A few comments to your points:

- Ripping = Stealing = Bad = Pixels removed ,
    Poster gets one time warning

- Submit your own work. Adjusting somebody elses stuff
  should be ok as long as credit is given and references are made.

- NPA, gradients : You are not getting a better (pixel) artist when
           you use them. Commenting on them should be sufficient
           and in voting mechanism it can be a method of removal.

- NPA, Color conservation: Completely agree with you!

- NPA, Oekaki: Can be stylistic choice and again should be
           permitted if it comes through the voting.

- WIPs: 'some people have a very low tolerance for C&C'
               Actually, then you shouldn't be posting in public.
          But ok, there could be a checkmark to have the
          poster control of the comment-editor. By default
          it could be turned on. But poster could uncheck it
          thus preventing anybody to comment on the piece.
          (The rating system could be in place, oh and OT: maybe
           the system could be adjusted to see a kind of
           score where you could maybe also see how many
           people have scored you )

- Leading by Example/Elitism: My comment on this is
          that you should not do to others what you don't
          want them to do to you ....

Another NPA could be added to your list:

NPA, Color Reduction: Allthough it is a great way of
        learning it will not make you a better artist if you
        keep using it when making pixels. Again, let the
        voting mechanism do its work.
       


Those were my two cents.


Best regards from

M.E.

Color Conservation:

Pixel art has its roots in the ages of system restrictions, when you had 4 or 16 colors and maybe you couldn't even use them all next to each other because of the GPU. Artists were forced to work around this adversity and they developed the ability to make great art with few colors and well-looping animations with few frames. Also, the use of color is simplified once you have finalized your palette: instead of having to know which one of your 2.8 million reddish colors, you use the red in your palette and accent with other colors to give subtle details of hue. And after the art is done, one may tweak palettes to their liking. With 16 or 20 colors this isn't a problem at all, but when one has 256 or 16,777,216 colors in a massive piece, even if it was all done pixel-by-pixel, it will be a veritable bitch to tweak colors by hand.

 

Gradients:

Gradients encourage sucky shading and laziness in the application of color to surfaces. This is never a good thing. They also inflate color counts massively if done with a tool. If you need a transition between colors in pixel art, it's acceptable to add a few colors or dither, but having a new shade for every 1pixel line of your huge gradient is ridiculous and will most likely result in wasted colors and the gradient looking out of place in your piece.

 

WIPs:

I don't know; I think some members may have problems with cookie-cutter responses like "needs aa. dither it too, and clean your lines" There's nothing wrong with these crits, but it should be a goal of a critique to emphasize WHY the actions prescribed will benefit the piece. If the poster can't find a reason the piece actually needs aa, but rather just noticed its absence and acted from that, then antialiasing can gtfo for the time being, if you know what I mean. So I think it would be useful for posts of critique to go through this change:

 

This:

You need more contrast and make the wings bigger. Also shift the hue so it'll make the thing look better. Maybe you could AA it?

 

To this:

If you added contrast (increased the difference between colors) it would help keep the sprite in front of the background because eyes are drawn to areas of high contrast. You could also achieve this by varying saturation some between sprite & BG. Also, the sprite's wings look really small for allowing flight; do you have a reference you're getting proportions from or is there an in-game reason for it, or would you consider changing them for realism? One thing you might want to try is tinting highlight tones of colors toward the color of the lightsource, and shadow colors toward the color of the object that would reflect the most light on them, so you would tint the sprite's highlights red from the setting sun and his shadows purple from the blue sea's reflection of light that's mostly red. <AA comment removed because sprites on dynamic BGs chould not be aa'ed to them.>

M.E. and Monkey 'o Doom, those were the kind of comments I was hoping to get. Thank you. 

jalonso, finally someone gave an answer about Oekaki that isn't a simple "it isn't pixelart" and one that I can actually understand. Thank you very much.
(And I guess this could have gone into the FAQ, you should be able to merge this topic into it. Just move the first post.)

Hopefully this will get more comments so I can get a broader understanding on how the average artist sees these topics. A lot of different places have a lot of different rules regarding the very same things. I'm just testing the limits and boundaries here now, so I don't make an idiot out of myself later.