The issue is that it's gonna be discouraging for your art journey if you try to self-upload on danbooru as a beginner artist with still lots of art skills to tackle,
Discouragement is subjective, I obviously came back for more punishment
the line quality may have been the main issue for your uncolored/greyscale works, but here the coloring is muddy (i understand it feels "natural" to just go for "blacker" and "whiter" colors to try to shade, and color theory is rarely intuitive, but it doesn't look good)
No color burn or color dodge tools were used, so I'm not quite sure what is being referred to here about "don't just scale your brightness up and down". I learned from pixiv artists to use blue or purple tones in some cases instead of black for shading, but it depends on the scenario. The balloons have a natural warm yellow white lighting source, and they reflect off of each other as lighting sources. green on a red balloon is not white light. on lopunny's ears there is even a soft red tint around the edges to add color variance, like watercolor artists do for greenery. examining lopunny's thighs, the soft lighting around the paprasol's glowing star is yellow not white. but sure, the balloons have a very vivid hue overall if that is what you mean?
the edges of the paint (how sharp or progressive transitions between colors are) are just wonky and inconsistent,
I'm going to need specifics on which edges, do you mean the area between the ears and parasol, or what? i need more info
hurting the overall look of the drawing a whole lot, which is the 2nd major issue; lopunny's fur is "too" rendered, seems like you spent a lot of time zoomed in, adding in those tiny individual brush strokes, and that's really a shame because that's a lot of time spent doing something that worsened how she looks,
I suspect part of the issue you perceive is only because fur reflects light differently than anime skin, however, lopunny isn't made of skin, she has fur
skin post #6142762 post #2560854
versus
fur post #146998 post #561133 post #1577375
and then all the stuff around the image focus also has the issues of muddy shading and bad edges,
I believe this term is called style of brushstrokes, and last time I checked not every object IRL or even in manga or anime has an outline or a hard edge, edges can be soft or hard. there is a whole style of painting by doris leeper called "hard edge painting", which you would probably love if you like your edges flat and hard
but worsened by the overuse of the airbrush and how many different airbrush spots you tried to cram in, i get you tried to make the image look festive but it's a hard thing to manage without making it a noisy mess that hurts the composition.
ok, I'm going to wager multiple things are being referred to here, both the focus blur in behind and front. and when you say it hurts the composition, I'm going to assume you mean the "flow" or how your eye is drawn across the image which is a part of gestalt. to begin with, the visual flow in this image isn't strong because lopunny is center focus and the balloons are circular, not necessarily pointing the eye towards any given direction. lopunny herself in a way acts as a giant arrow, that might draw your eye up or down, but not across the entire image. it could be considered that this lack of gestalt flow in itself is a feature of the art composition. every art composition doesn't have to or need to be dynamic.
personally I did not want as much confetti focus blur for festivity, but I had a group critique, and most people in the group preferred the image that had more color versus the one with less background color.
You also said you spent months on this single artwork, but if you want to learn and draw good looking art faster, tackling lots of smaller less ambitious drawings is better both for your motivation and your learning process, it lets you break down areas you need to improve in "manageable chunks" and it should also make art more fun.
Art is fun to me because I draw what I love, not because I draw what other people like, which is why I "over-rendered" lopunny's fur to begin with. she didn't look fluffy enough, or huggable enough like a stuffed animal. but I believe she looks fluffy and cute. although my images don't have a lot of visibility to begin with, I had over 50 people on pixiv like my deleted gardevoir image, so maybe some people do think my art looks good and that in a way makes me happy in return
Hope this helps
Also, unrelated but you really don't need to export your works as huge 90Mb png's at just 8500² of resolution, that's an absurd filesize for an image, just like the downscale you did on the pixiv source, it's fine to also compress a little of the image quality when you export, drawing programs are good at doing that very efficiently in a way that makes no noticeable change in how it looks to the human eye. (and unpopular opinion but unless your work contains transparent pixels, choosing .jpg instead is completely fine)
Downscaling would just reinforce the muddy argument for image disapproval.
while i do agree 90mb is large, image filesize is in no way relevant to the perceived contents of the image, which is what approval should be based on in addition to a variety of other factors (properly tagged, not illegal, etc.)
JPG noticeably alters the colorspace of an image unlike PNG.
In addition, the high resolution is not only for archival but it allows affordances to the viewer. some viewers do like to zoom in and crop images as phone wallpapers for example, and this image of course would be great for that because of it is large enough to afford this. uploading my original canvas size allows viewers to make that decision for themselves and not be stuck with a big case of the pixel "jaggies". I'm sure I'm not the only one who hates seeing pixels in wallpapers.
Your "answer" is completely missing the point though. And good luck figuring out an "objective" system that works to filter art here. Just know that if you post stuff without thinking of how likely it is to get approved, there's no point asking why it gets deleted when it does
The "objective" system would to have a threshold for how much score the image gets while the image is sitting in the modqueue, because I've had several images get score only to be downvoted again by mods behind a mask as if my images are flicking them the bird. if they don't like it they don't have to push the anti-score button they can just ignore it like everyone else (obviously they ignore it enough to click disinterested), and if the image has a positive score higher than 3 or 5 or something then it gets approved as long as the mods click the "this is not illegal" and "this is tagged properly" checkboxes.
in a way it baffles me how I can spend a good half hour tagging my image, only for my tagging work to be completely discarded. i think i speak on behalf of everyone here when I say the mods obviously have no regard for anyone's time but their own. frankly its disrespectful and insulting not only to me but also fellow uploaders who are trying their best to curate a wonderful image board here. I have been lurking danbooru and similar boards for over six years, and if I had known this was how people got treated on a daily basis (this thread in itself probably should have been a flag at 250+ pages,) I would have never tried to upload here to begin with. but in a way, now it has become a challenge to me, a soul in a pit of torment
