An idea popped into my mind today, and I'd like to get some feedback on it.

For years, this website has had several ways for fans to submit and share their art. The FanArt section is sitting pretty at over 350 pictures; the Oekaki board is now home to an impressive 7481 pictures; and this very forum has seen dozens, if not hundreds of art pieces not displayed anywhere else on the site. While a few people have contributed to two or even all three of these places, most have remained in their own area. Looking at all this, I asked myself: what if it was all linked together?

I already have a project underway to allow people to comment on the pictures submitted in the FanArt archive, giving a chance to other artists or simply random visitors to share their thoughts on a specific piece. Looking beyond that, however, I thought that a central hub dedicated to Mega Man FanArt might be welcome by some people. This place would allow each member to upload their own pictures directly (no more e-mailing me), regrouping them in a user gallery available to all. The oekaki board would be tied into this system, so that each artist's page would include the pictures done on paper, Photoshop, or oekaki all in a single location.

You can picture this as a sort of mini-DeviantArt, focused on Mega Man art, with the added ability to draw pictures right on the site thanks to the oekaki applets. It'd be easy from there to include tags with each picture, creating automatic galleries focused on artwork from each series, canon vs fan characters, crossovers, etc. That system would essentially take over the current FanArt section. The oekaki board's data would be available in the common hub, while the independant system that's been available for years would stay unchanged for those who prefer that format.

Now, the big question is: is this worth it? The Mega Man community has obviously scaled down in the past several years, and we can't really tell if this would attract artists to contribute their own art or even draw new images on the oekaki board. Is a Mega Man-only hub pointless? Do people even draw Mega Man fanart in interesting quantities anymore? My inbox has been empty for a while, now.

Would you submit your pictures, even the older ones, in order to create your gallery? Would you comment on others' efforts? Would you tell your friends to join? Would you stick to your own website/DeviantArt profile? Or would you ignore it to go take care of your strawberries on FarmVille?

I'd like to hear about any kind of feedback or comments that you have on this concept. The basic FanArt picture commenting I talked about will happen soon enough, but the full integration in a hub is something else that I'd like to get your honest opinion on.

Coming from you, I'm not surprised.

However, it looks like the stars are not aligned yet. In two weeks, I've received two replies only. I've also posted an announcement about this over at the oekaki board, but zero members even bothered to contact me. This tells me that I don't really have the critical mass to do it right now, not on the Mega Man PC Website at least. I'm keeping my design notes, of course: as Mega X said, this might very well be worth the effort later on, especially since I'll already have some of the building blocks.




Of course not. While my idea is to regroup all the fanart available through this site (and the expanded Mega Man community, hopefully), there's nothing in the code that says "Mega Man only". Expanding beyond that would require a separate database and a new website to make it stand on it's own, meaning more time spent on it, but it's nothing out of reach. It'd make the end result look closer to DeviantArt, with a tighter focus on drawn art, but with the added function of the oekaki applets to draw in-place and the labels system I mentioned. The labels would allow the creation of picture galleries focused on art type, series or whatever else applicable, and make searching much easier.

For your curiosity, this is kind of an offshot of the "picture gallery with commenting" concept that we talked about a few weeks ago. This includes more features, of course, but the core concept is using many of the same components.