Hey, I'm a newbie to these forums. I thought I'd join up seeing as I've been developing pixel art for, I'd say, about a year now, on and off, as a hobby. I never shared my art with anyone outside of Facebook because the art that I drew actually represented real people. Some of my friends enjoyed my drawings of them and so that gave me a reason to do more, but now I'm actually getting a bit more serious about doing it because I've been studying programming in college and I just finished my 4th semester, which introduced me to game development and design. I made a platforming game with basic pixelated drawings, a little bit of which I ripped off an existing game at the time, and I decided that it might be interesting to combine my two efforts together to see what I can make of it. I've always been a HUGE fan of classic NES/SNES RPGs too so it makes the process even more entertaining as well as potentially profitable.
Here's what I made so far. From left to right is the oldest to newest work. Everything, to me, is still technically a WIP because I'm cursed with the whole perfectionist OCD dealio and I can ALWAYS find flaw. What makes that worse is that I've only had a couple high school art classes so I don't really know too much about shading. I still have to do some reading to brush up my knowledge and skills in that area.
I created each of these from scratch using the free edition of Graphics Gale on my spare time at work and at home. I started by making smaller NES style characters (not by color limitations, but size limitations). The first one I made was supposed to be a pixelized version of me, but in the end it turned out to look just barely like me. Even then I find that after all my attempts at this craft I still like the late version of the first character I made simply because the colors contrast so much better than the others. After the first character I decided to try using a proper color palette, but what I ended up doing is making smoother gradients that really made the art have a completely different look and feel to it. I didn't want this, but every attempt after it I found that I couldn't break the habit.
I credit my interest in creating my own pixel art to the artists of the upcoming fan made game Card Saga Wars (
http://cardgallery.tales-tra.com/main.htm). The main artist on that site (Abysswolf, Ahruon, or Orkimides) made a small tutorial of how he/she creates his/her characters and that really sparked my interest in believing that I could whip something up myself.
I've posted this here mainly for fun, but also for any overall critique or advice aside from reading tutorials because it is already on my list of things to do. As of late I'm more of a casual artist at work, but I'd like to pick up my efforts soon. I figure that since I am new to it I should inquire with more advanced artists just like a new singer should always find out of they have potential or they simply just suck at it =P.
Thanks everyone! =D
If anyone needs anymore proof of design I can share any of the incomplete versions of each character. I have plenty. I go through TONS of revisions and versions or whatever. =P
EDIT: Some have had more revisions than others so if there are some that look poorer in quality than others before time it's because I spent more time with them than others. I hope that makes sense.
