Electronic Sparks submissions must be scanned from clear, black and white artwork with bold lines (or created electronically in an illustration or paint program). Hatching, texturing, and faint/fine lines do not translate well into the Sparks format; keep images as sharp and uncluttered as possible. Manually clean your scans in a paint program to remove any specks or other stray markings. See Dan Smith's images for The Dungeoneers as perfect examples. The only acceptable file format is .GIF format, with the following specifications:

• Non-dithered
• 1-Bit
• No interlacing
• 800x500 pixel dimensions (see Scaling, below)

Please do not submit Sparks images in other formats (PCX, JPG, TIF, EPS, GIFs with palettes larger than 1-bit, etc)! Submit fronts and backs as separate images. Each image file should be 10k or smaller.

Give files brief, descriptive names followed by a hyphen and either the word "front" or "back," like so:

• warrior-front.gif
• warrior-back.gif
• maiden-front.gif
• maiden-back.gif

Send all files collected into a single .ZIP or .RAR archive to sjohn@cumberlandgames.com. The archive  isn't for bandwidth-conservation (GIF files are already compressed); it's to provide a single clean "package" and insure the files aren't munged in email.

Scaling: Figures should be 750 pixels from the top of their head to the base of their heel if they're meant to be as tall as a normal adult man (or taller). For shorter characters, scale downward proportionately, assuming 750 pixels represents a height of 6 feet (so a 3-foot tall character should be 375 pixels tall). Standard Sparks should fit in an empty white box 800 pixels high by 500 pixels wide. Wider Sparks (like Bigass Ogre) may be submitted in a GIF as large as 800x800 pixels. No Spark in any scale or size should be submitted in a box wider than it is tall (if you have a creative exception in mind, like the elongated Sparks in Sparks: Critters, feel free to suggest it).