I've taken to making dark-skinned HAs and I've noticed something odd, especially with facial items - little grey pixels where they don't belong. Well, mostly grey, but sometimes they're white or other colours. Either way, it's clear that the item wasn't really tested on dark skins before it was released, leading the shading being designed for light skins and looking very odd on others.

Some examples:

I'm sure there's probably loads more that I've missed.

I'm fairly sure the artists are using solid greys to make a black area look softer, rather than black with a lower opacity. Which is obviously not going to look great on all skin tones, which is frustrating to say the least. There are some eyes with stray white/pale pixels too that look fine on pale bases, but terrible on anything darker.

Gosh, yes, please stop. And for the record, the shading for the marbles looks bad on the white base, too.

I never use dark bases so I never noticed grayness and I don't feel like I can give any sort of feedback on that. But I do agree that the shadows or whatever on the new Marble eyes looks odd to me. Is it supposed to shadow a nose? My HA barely even has a nose...

I know some of the older items had grey not black used shrug they've probably been updated but I don't like to presume people don't repeat errors, particularly when we end up with items like this.

I am sure I am not the only player that would prefer to see quality artwork over high quantities.

I am sure I am not the only player that would prefer to see quality artwork over high quantities.

Most of the ones I spot are SubQ/Cashshop items, it'd be /really/ nice if the higher end items got checked out too, or does Esmeralda only like the paler skinned HAs shopping at Sub Q?

<-- one eye is lined in black and the other in grey. WTF.

Smaller colour bleeds but they're still noticeable on a darker base.

Just plain not sure what's going on on the dark base:

• all recolours where applicable.

Since apparently some people are getting what should be solid black eyebrows wrong, I have NO FAITH that they can tell when not to use solid grey, particularly when there are examples here with solid grey lines. These are just Face items, I cba to go through body/full body and to check all the clothing items... It's definitely not just older items suffering from poor quality control though.

Was nice being able to take a look at these and see the issues since I have a dark base right now. Love all these colour bleeds.

As someone who spends a lot of time making things transparent, I do chuck a few different colours behind things to check for colour-bleeds and loose pixels. It's probably the only way you can double check everything's going to look alright when used with ANY background.

Kinda baffled at grey being used for shading on some of these?

Lol be careful. If the staff fixes these, you might piss people off that religiously used these items on light bases. You wouldn't BELIEVE the backlash after I suggested that the gray colored mouths be fixed because they showed up badly on dark bases and the staff edited them. Apparently, it made them unwearable, just by them being darker.

(Disclaimer, I'm as white as my HA would imply.)

Part of me wants to change the HA tone and go through all of the face items just to see how bad it really is-- but all I really have to say in regards to "how bad" is this:

That sucker has pure gray lines, was pointed out on the day of it's release... and users were basically told to stfu it's fine. So, if an item-- the main thing you see first, can have gray LINEART.. well. What more needs to be said?

Y'know other than-- I'm not surprised, but I would be if these were revamped/changed because if there's no consequence to doing something that looks bad but is easy... why do it differently? (disclaims: no I'm not saying they need to be fired, I'm saying they need to fix things without being paid to do so because it'll only take them 15 minutes and if they keep having to be inconvenienced by fixing their mistakes maybe they'll stop doing it the that way).

For the record, I was one of those who complained about the mouths. Not because the lineart color was changed but because instead of having a thin black line + a black line with a nice lowered opacity that worked for everything we instead got a big fat 3px black mouth that looked bad on all the bases.

Pretty sure that also happened when there was all of two male mouths onsite, too (opposed to our current like 12 xD), so the alternatives were basically non-existent.

I still fail to see what's so bad about the redone mouths. I've used pretty much all of them, and they all look just fine to me.

They fixed them, though, didn't they? Like I know they changed them once, people got mad, and I swear they went back and did something that made them better.

Unless I imagined that, which in case Idk they apparently grew on me because I typically use the same one 9ever (I apparently have lips on now but I don't remember why anymore).

I think they did adjust the opacity, but I distinctly remember people STILL complaining about them, even after that was altered. Both versions looked totally fine to me, but the originals did not because they were 100% gray.

No the originally didn't look okay (they looked gray even on pale HAs), I didn't like the 180^ fat black line, but I like the way they are now. I do remember people still complaining but I think that's basically because change is hard.

And because y'know, as long as we complain loud enough we always get our way (unless it's stat related).

Or unless there's some deep dark secret reason they absolutely refuse to tell us, and it's forever just 'Because reasons!'

TBH I'm pretty fed up with the state of the art quality control on this site, it takes all of a minute, if that, to check an image against a dark and pale background, then put in a primary colour fill and shift the hue through the spectrum to check it looks okay against most colours and there's nothing stray hanging around and if checking against the darker HAs as part of the usual process, how are these things going unchecked?

And lineart? Geez just double check it's black by turning the lightness right down if you're prone to clicking the wrong colour... How do you even end up with that grey...? And why isn't it picked up on?? It's sloppy not to do it, I wouldn't even think of letting a commission go without checking it, I'd be mortified if I went to see a commissioner's pet profile and saw their overlay had stray pixels all around it, it's nothing but a comment on me and my work.

I suspect it may be an issue of transparency or pressure sensitivity with regards to black lineart. I can only speak for myself of course, but those Soda Jerk eyes do have black lineart. Resizing may effect it as well? I'm not sure, but I know outside of running the brush over it a few more times, i can't make those lines any blacker (and I try to avoid doing the pen tool since that can make facial features resize too sharply.)

I know you've done some facial hair for the avatars, have you ever drawn facial features? Would you have any suggestions on making darker lines for such small images?

I haven't because they can't be accepted on site and I've never bothered with the contests. Black at a lower transparency shouldn't appear grey on a dark background when saved as a .png, so there is definitely and issue with saving or colour bleeding through, it might be that the lines are being coloured under, by the white of the eye for example.

Means to avoid it would either be to thicken the black line, which may make it bulky on the HA, or to make sure the colour under the line isn't bleeding through, whenever I have issues with this on overlays where I've inadvertently made the lineart too thin, I either select the whole thing expand/contract by 1px (depending on if I selected the image or the empty space, and invert if it's the empty space) and on another layer fill in black to strengthen the lineart with minimal effect on the colours and tidy up where required, this probably won't work with something as small as HA features, but a similar method could be used, mask or lock the colour layers and colour under the lines with black, you'd probably only need one pixel thickness of colouring + the aliasing.

Alternately coping the whole image (the solid areas, not eyeshadow etc...) as one layer, making the whole thing solid black and putting it behind all the other layers can stop colour bleeding through, but won't stop lines changing colour from bleeds within the image itself.

Best bet: Using a 1px brush and eraser and making sure there is no colour that can possibly come through the lines other than the colour that is meant to be there is your best option, even if that means working at the smaller size after checking it against the darker background or flipping between the two.

Okay so I can't not rise to a challenge apparently... so I had a go at it ¬_¬ (I've said it once, I'll say it again, having access to more coloured bases would make CW making a lot easier).

Writing as I draw: [li]doing lineart with 3px hard bush, 1% spacing, wacom set to firmest setting, pressure compatibility off, going over weak lines and strengthening as needed [li]colouring without selecting areas to fill with the same sized bush, going up to the outer lines but not under -- HA's colour bleeding through is less noticeable than item colour bleeding through, particularly on natural skin tones [li]Shading done the same as colouring, by hand, not through multiply layers which can do weird things when saved for web. [li]Final shading done with black on a new layer, low opacity. [li]Dark red layer put behind everything to check for bleeds and holes -- fixed as applicable [li]Unless you flatten the image first, resize through Image Size not through Save For Web, Photoshop knocks layers out of alignment in Save for Web for some odd reason that can and will cause stray pixels -- which is often why something that looks fine on Photoshop looks odd online. However resizing through the Image options will almost always under or over sharpen the image, so applying the image and just hiding all the separate layers and leaving only the combined image usually gets me the best results, though it's a pain when you have to do it all over again if you need to fix things = [li]Check on submission page / against normal sized HAs, decide it's weak as hell and fix. [li]Remember why you avoided drawing small CWs and go crosseyed trying to figure out if the image is okay or not but hey there's no stray pixels so that's something.

WIP shots

In short: Avoid putting colour under the lines as much as possible and check against a darker background at full and smaller size.

Make sure this is turned off on your tablet settings if you're on a wacom. I have NO IDEA why they default to compatibility, but unless you turn it off you're running with only half the max sensitivity to your pen, and having the full range is generally just very useful.

(Ooooh your forumset art is so pretty TTATT)

I totally basically traced over your facial guide thing ^^;;; the HA's face is so weirdly shaped.