I have to admit that when it comes to moderating Creature of the Week, I feel like I have a responsibility to make sure that the activity's quality does not deteriorate in any way. Now, I feel Clark and I have done a pretty good job with COW lately. We've recently experienced a spike in participation that's been quite nice. But, I always like to ensure that the level of quality of the winning entry is up to snuff. I'm a little ashamed to admit but I become kind of nervous when it's wednesday morning and I don't see any entries that I consider to be of my arbitrarily assigned "winner's quality". When I'm afraid right off the bat that this might happen, or if I feel there might not be few entries, I always make sure to try and get one in. It sounds weird or even like I'm a dick, but I kind of put myself in there as a fail-safe, at least for myself. I'm attempting to ensure that each round has at least one entry of decent quality. It sounds arrogant, but I know I'm not bad, and in some cases I know I can do much better than what is being entered. It actually happened one time that doing this was the only thing preventing there being no entries of a "winning" level in the poll, that round was (maybe you can guess) round #207: The Healer... and you may be able to guess (or remember) what happened: I won that round. It may be a stupid goal, or unfair to less experienced artists, but I do care that very high quality art is being pulled out in Creature of the Week, it encourages other higher level artists to compete which is nice. Not because I like higher level artists and don't like lower level artists, but because COW is a learning experience, and the new artists have a much harder time learning how to do it right, it they don't have good examples of how to do it right, and if they aren't getting pointers from people who can do it right.
...So in conclusion, this round I was afraid that there might not be a lot of work going into the poll, and I was worried that there may not be work of (what I consider to be) sufficient quality to shamelessly waltz into the Winners' Thread. So I busted out a sketch this weekend and threw this together in 2 hours this evening. For a piece that took a total of maybe 2 and a half hours, I think it turned out alright. Let me know what ya' think.
