A few weeks ago /r/leagueoflegends ran a contest for reaching 4 million subscribers to the subreddit. There were four categories, and four winners in each category. With around 2 days left on the submission deadline, I submitted a Loss parody for the category of “4 image description” and ended up getting first place, winning myself 1848 RP.
Here are some notes about the submission I made.1
First, I must note that I unfortunately can’t add the RP to my main:
So I elected to add it to my second account instead.
Despite winning the category, I actually thought my submission wasn’t popular. For a few days the submission thread wasn’t set to contest mode so I was able to see other submissions getting quite a bit of traction before, presumably, somebody realised it should really be set to contest mode and all the votes were hidden.2
In that thread (which is different from the voting thread), my submission got no traction at all, and when I submitted it as OC to /r/LolFanArt, it got only about a dozen upvotes, which is quite low for a submission of its type.
At that point I was resigned to accepting that I had spent around four hours (on-topic at least!) to execute on what was essentially a high quality shitpost just because the idea gave me a hearty laugh. Certainly not the worst reason to do something, but still a bit disappointing. I had even thought about sharing it to /r/JhinMains after the contest was over in the hopes that a few more people might enjoy that hearty chuckle with me.
A week or two passed by while I tended to other things, and then one day I got a private message from /r/leagueoflegends letting me know that I’d won in my category, getting first. It’s such a small thing, but that moment was still a little surreal for me, given that I was reasonably sure I wasn’t even going to place in the top four required for prizing.
Anyway, here are the “behind the scenes” notes of the picture:
This is, of course, based on Loss, which spawned.. quite a following of sorts.
The first panel is a cutout of Jhin’s splash, with the Jhin champion spotlight in the background “outside”. You can see the top part of the doorway is pretty aliased, because by the time I got around to fixing it I decided that the four hours I’d spent was roughly the maximum amount I was willing to and decided not to fix this and a few other minor issues.
Another funny thing is that I actually went to quite a bit of effort (all things considered) reconstructing the bottom corner of the window where the hand had covered it up because I originally had Jhin not covering that part of the image.
But in the end he did so it was all for nought Naut 🙁 Here’s a side by side:
The second panel is a cutout of Jhin’s face from his teaser reveal video, with hands cut out from his splash art. The background is role allocation in champion select. I scoured the internet for at least half an hour trying to find somebody who had that image of champ select in the new client, but found nothing good enough to use so I had to literally queue up myself and screenshot champ select. Tragically I got put on red side, so I didn’t even get it looking the way I’d hoped for.
The hand on the viewer’s right could easily be improved, as this was simply the viewer’s-left hand recycled into a different orientation and size that it wasn’t properly cropped for when I did the original hand-cropping – that’s why it looks so blurry and has a gap on the left side.
The third panel (which I think came out poorly in the end, unfortunately) is an in-game render of Jhin3 and the background is just an in-game shot of SR in bot lane. To replicate the grey screen of death I overlaid solid color (at partial transparency), but if had put aside another half hour the better solution would’ve been to take a de-saturated copy of half of that panel’s layers and overlay them on top of the originals at reduced transparency. Oh well.
In hindsight I probably also should’ve made Yi’s head smaller, particularly because the head on Jhin’s model is comparatively small compared to the other Jhin-heads there. I think I initially left it that size to cover up the original guy’s head, but obviously I could’ve just erased that lol.
To get a screenshot of this I went back to the file and it turns out I actually did erase most of it by the end, so yeah that head-size was unnecessary.
The fourth panel is Jhin from Awaken, with a guest appearance by the defeat popup and the Iron 4.. helmet thing.
Fun fact: I had to manually “jpg scuff” the sides and bottom of each panel when editing, so that things matched the original look. You can see at the bottom right side-edge of panel 3 I didn’t fully do this on the champion UI and it looks marginally misaligned.
If you’ve read this far then you might also enjoy what it looked like after about 5 minutes when still deciding what I wanted to do given that I have no capacity to actually draw jhin myself:
And then again after about 2 – 2 1/2 hours when I went to bed, complete with some notes about what I still needed to do:
My thanks to the /r/leagueoflegends folks for organising the contest, and I guess for everyone who participated in the voting as well. I’ll be honest – I forgot to vote while the voting threads were up, so I’m glad others were there to pick up that slack.
If you check the announcement thread you can take a gander at the other 15 winning submissions, including the rather controversial 4th place entry for the “4 image description” category:
