Curators and Curator Information

[Monbrey]

Art Gallery Staff

Listed below are all the people who keep the Art Gallery running, watching out for little kids sticky fingers, burglars in the night and making sure your works are displayed and evaluated appropriately.

Section Head:
Monbrey

Curators:
Alaskapigeon
EmBreon
FrozenChaos

How To:

Become a Curator:

Becoming a Curator is easy! All you have to do is tell us what you think of some pictures and answers a few teeny tiny questions. Well... maybe not that easy. If you're interested, read the How To Make Pokeart thread, as well as rest of this one, and contact me for a copy of the test.

Score Artwork:

If you're even considering becoming a Curator, you should already have a pretty good idea of what sort of scores are appropriate by looking through how our current Curators score the submitted pieces.

It is generally a good idea to consider the rank of the Pokemon attempted when providing a score. Although we do not operate on a purely pass/fail system, the score is still important. For example, a submitted piece depicts Charizard, which would require an 80 or higher, but you don't think it's good enough. What about for a Charmander? If so, then the score should fall in the range of 50-80. If you still don't think it's good enough, then you should probably score it below 50.

The difficulty of creating the submitted piece is also another important factor when dealing with the CG artforms. For something such as banners, there's only so much that is genuinely artistic, the rest being a case of correctly layering and arranging stock images. Similarly, a perfectly created sprite can't be considered on the same scale as a canvas artwork or drawing, and the scores for these "less difficult" art forms should not be as high as others and should not be awarded scores such as 90+.

Critique Artwork:

Critiquing a piece is where your personal artistic knowledge is important, as there is no standard criteria across all art forms. We expect you to have a thorough understanding of the important aspects of any art form you are evaluating. We understand that you may not have a grasp over every art form. If you don't feel confident evaluating a particular art form, don't evaluate it. You may even be told to only evaluate certain art forms when given your Curator License.

For each evaluation, we expect to see accompanying your score a list of reasons that you, personally, came to award that score. In evaluating a drawing, you could discuss any number of factors including colour, line, linestroke, detail, shape, size, lighting, shading, shadows, perspective and many more. There are also key factors that do spread across all art forms, such as ensuring the Pokemon is anatomically correct, the meaning/story depicted or correctly featured or that the piece is correctly signed/proven.

It should go without saying that no-one should be maliciously critical of any artwork. You should be providing constructive criticism. Even the worst MS Paint pieces should be treated with a respectful suggestion that they improve.

For a completely made-up example:

I really like the way you've depicted the emotion on both the Pokemon and the Trainer's faces, a mix of sadness and surprise (story/meaning). Facial expressions can often be hard to draw well, but you've managed to do so nicely. The trainer walking towards us while the Pokemon is left in the background (perspective) really makes you feel a distance between them. However it's important to note that the Pokemon doesn't actually have any whiskers (anatomically incorrect), so that did cost you some points.
I also felt that the background and the trainer lacked detail for such a large piece (size/detail). The Pokemon, while excellently drawn, is too small and too distant in the piece to be a strong focal point, instead it seems you've attempted to draw the focus to the Trainer in the foreground. The dark Pokemon colouring combined with the night-time scenery leaves the Pokemon almost lost. It wasn't until I was looking to see what the Trainer was leaving that I found him.
Overall, it's a good piece and you show talent, but not quite enough to score the X you needed to capture the Pokemon.

Score: 55/100

Curator Payments:

Based on the quality and level of detail of your art evaluations, you will recieve anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 per piece.

• A basic evaluation that mentions only a couple of reasons will earn you the minimum amount, and you should look at improving your efforts in the future or risk losing your Curator License. If it is particularly bad or inaccurate, you may not be paid at all. This level of grade should really only occur regularly when people request re-score, in which case listing the couple of things they improved on would be appropriate.
  
• A moderately detailed grade such as the example above and better will earn you in the $2,000 to $4,000 range. These are appropriate for most pieces and should list both what was done well and what could be improved before trying for Pokemon of a higher difficulty or improving on the current piece.
  
• A long and detailed grade will earn you $5,000, or maybe more under special circumstances. Generally any high-quality, high-difficulty pieces deserves an evaluation of this quality. It should discuss every possible aspect of the art form, focusing on both what the artist did particularly well but importantly on what they could improve, as well as anything else you feel is appropriate. The idea is to maximise feedback to highly-talented artists in order to push them to the peak of their abilities.
  

Curators will be paid on a fortnightly basis by Monbrey.