o65. striving for main board success

A lot of people seem to be confused about what can be considered Main Board quality and cannot. The Main Board is meant to showcase art that one spends a decent amount of time on. It is not meant for doodles or practicing a new and experimental drawing/coloring technique. If you wish to practice, try for the doodle board or critique board instead. There are plenty of talented people who can help you here.

Remember that the main rule of the Main Board is that there is a required ten-minute minimum of effort in your work. However, we will not be looking at just the timer to judge whether or not your piece is Main Board-worthy—we will also be looking at the quality of your work. Some people can produce Main Board-quality pics a lot faster than others can, so we will take things like that into account.

When I say quality of work, I don't mean that you have to be someone who has years of experience and all that. You can still be new to oekaki and drawing and work hard and make something MB-worthy. You don't have to be stylish, you don't have to be flashy, you just have to put in a good amount of effort.

Anyway, here are some examples of what is Main Board quality and what is not:
Not Main Board Quality:
This is a picture I would consider more of doodle board quality. The lines here are kind of shaky and rather messy, am I right? The coloring is really messy as well, though it's an interesting way to use white. But it looks like the artist didn't try very hard at all, doesn't it? It's a scribble with colors slapped on it.

Just to show you that the timer doesn't matter so much when it comes to quality, the timer for this picture is about 25 minutes. This was way back from when I first joined MO. I wasn't new to oekaki then (I've been oekaki-ing since 2001 or something like that) and I wasn't new to drawing either (that goes to maybe 1998 or even before), but see, even then I wasn't a Main Board artist.


Here's another one I wouldn't consider MB-worthy just yet either. While the lines have at least cleaned up, the coloring is still of the weird kind.

I would probably tell this person to ask for help on shading and suggest line tapering to make the lines look less chunky, because with this style of coloring, the lines kind of takes away from the colors because they're even bolder than the bright colors. Of course, that's preference and critiquing, so you don't really need to listen to this right now. xD;

This probably took, like, ten minutes tops.

Like the last one, this one has cleaner lineart than the first one does, but the thing about this one is that it has a very unfinished feeling about it because of the very stark background and lack of shading (though, at least we have full base colors here). If it had at least a background color and some shading, it would probably be more MB-worthy, but at this point, it looks more like a WIP or a doodle.

I'm pretty sure the timer for this was around 10-15 minutes but the original never sent. xD;

Almost There...:
Here's something that's almost there, but not quite yet.

I can still see some of the base sketch behind the lines; Always make sure you erase them or hide that layer! The lines aren't too bad, but could stand just a bit of clean up here and there, or maybe some variance in thickness.

Also, the shading and coloring could use a bit of work. It's still messy, but otherwise, it isn't so bad and so far off at this point.

Timer for this is 16 minutes. Still over the 10-minute requirement, but see how quality is more important in determining whether something is more suited to the doodle board or not?

Main Board Quality:
See this? This is a good example of what Main Board quality is.

The lineart is very clean here. It's not sketchy or very shaky, and you can't see the original sketch lines through anything. The coloring here is also very neat compared to the previous pictures. You can tell that the artist took great care in creating this piece in comparison to the others.

Timer for this pic is a very nice 55 minutes.

Other Examples of Main Board Quality:

Although the lines on the right picture are a little messier, I'd still consider it MB-worthy because the coloring is very nice and the sketchy lines for this picture aren't so messy and distracting.

Timer for both pics is 75 minutes.

In short, all Main Board pictures should display a decent amount of effort in them. They don't have to be perfect, and you don't have to spend hours upon hours on them either. You don't have to be a da Vinci or a god to draw on the MB—you just have to put in time and effort. Honestly, most people can't produce something all that great given ten minutes of time, so if you want to produce something that won't be so likely to be moved to the DB, take the process slowly, and build up first rather than starting right at the lineart. Take your time, art shouldn't be a race—drawing something good takes patience, and if you don't have that patience, just stick to the doodle board or be prepared to get your head bitten off by those who care about their real work being bumped off by things not even worth anyone's time.

Timer: approximately 165 minutes.