Drawn to both questions, naturally.

I like drawings and animations the most. I think drawing has the most effort because you have to try to make the picture look as realistic as possible or as cartoony as possible, depending on what style of drawing you are doing. And the drawing are nice to look at. Like some of JAX007's stuff, his looks awesome and it looks like he spends a lot of time on his drawings. MK fakes are cool to look at if it looks origanal. But it doesn't take much effort because you just copy and paste, maybe edit the sprites a little, add some effects and a background, and then your done. But you could make it look really good too if you use custom sprites, like Arctic does. Havn't seen him in a long time though.

Animation of course!

Incorporating all the magic of effects put into fakes/drawings, but then extended to like 1000 frames

Not to mention they are more interesting to look at IMO.

Sprite animations are just glorified fakes. Most of them are c+p jobs, but because they're animated, no one says anything (or they just don't notice/care.)

Drawings to both too... since it's 100% self-made...

Drawings//Coloring and Animations.

Unless everything is done really well I generally don't even like fakes anymore. I guess I've just seen too much "crap".

What I'm in to right now is coloring and Gif animation. Coloring takes forever when you don't know what you want, or when you don't know how to shade and stuff(which is what I'm learning now..).

Animation is more tedious than it is time consuming(but it does take forever when you want to accomplish an ellaborate concept).

Frame by frame, every single little item has to be perfectly placed. And then you have to be considerate of the image quality. The pixel size(actuall picture size ??x??), and then the "file size"(??kb / mb)...and so on.

People don't understand how "heavy" effects make the image. They also don't understand how "costly" elaborate maneuvers are to the file size as well.

These are avatars for people on MkO I've made that have "simple actions".









This is a fairly elaborate sprite "maneuver//animation": (I know, everybodies seen this one before)



This one was my first animation, so it was the hardest. With this one, I had to cut stuff out of the background so that Sindel could look like she came from behind the statues. I had to shrink all the Sindel sprites.....and then set all these pieces of the picture in place. THEN after everything is treated so that the actual image looks good, take it over to the animation program and tediously inch Sindel up, the make her hover, draw backward, and fly forwards.

Took a very long time for me. The Avatars above took alot less time because I knew what I was doing. However, concluding a concept on those took the most time. Water, Fire, Clouds(for my current avy) ect....

Lmao, that's such an ignorant statement.

Anyways for me, the most pleasing MK art form would be fakes. As for most effort, I'd say animations easily.

You're right.



I can see where you're coming from though, as more than often sprite animations are pretty crude, but when done properly, like the animation in the link, it surpasses all!

Let's not forget though, MK animations don't HAVE to be sprites - can incorporate actual drawings into them also. Animation just seems to be the best of both Considering MK is a game though, I just reckon animation goes the best with it, as we are used to see the characters moving about and that - have always found it somewhat boring just seeing Sub Zero standing there in a new costume, or performing a motionless fatality for instance

And a lot of the time, people just keep submitting drawings they made in "10 minutes", 'ey Xel I think drawings are great, but they have to be done to a real high quality to make 'em such a good art form D-:

Art is obviously the best form of visualisation, but for MK, a video game, it just has to be animation IMO

I do agree that they are very "c+p".
However I think it's overlooked because there's different stuff to think about in an animation - framerates, timing, sounds, and the big one that Pred mentioned - optimisation (often irritatingly, ignored), for example, which, imo are more important than if you used MK's sprites.
Not to mention, a lot of people do a lotta custom stuff as well, backgrounds, designing effects, programming etc.

But to answer the two questions:

Which MK art category I enjoy viewing the most is animations simply because that's what I'm into.
However, I enjoy viewing the others as well.

Which do I think takes the most time and effort to produce?
I think anybody could put as much time and effort into any of them.
Just depends who's doing it.

But one thing that'l always remain true is that drawings are your own work (even if it is of somebody elses character).
I couldn't exactly chuck one of my MK animations onto a show reel and send it into a company to show my animation skill.
But I think a drawing artist could include a picture of Scorpion in their portfolio to show their drawing skills.

True, good point there. Though MK animation practice definitely heightens your skill level in that field if you ever wanna make your own IP

I think Drawings. Many MK characters are like blank canvases, completely open for one's own original interpretation. The fact that all ninjas and robots were pallet swaps of each other meant that really skilled artists had the means to re-create them into something better than even the MK team could have ever thought of (I'm looking at you Aculeus!). So even though fakes and animations are good, they simply don't have the "sit there at stare in amazement" quality of MK Drawings in my opinion. It really shows a person has creativity when they take a character like Kai, Kira, Reiko or even Stryker and completely reinvent them so people think "Hey I would really like to see that in the next MK game!" I'm still waiting for Aculeus' Sektor concept to make it on Ed Boon's desk.
Though it's not exactly drawing, special mention also needs to be made to 3D animated designs of MK characters like Bleed's Motaro. I think that takes more time and effort that Drawings, Fakes, and animations combined.

i say animatios


oh, and for the fake, i really like the style, i can acutaly picture that as a fatlity. good job