Help with Non Metallic Shading

[Night]

Oh man, depicting bronze is pretty annoying.. It has to do with the colour changes that exist in bronze after being exposed to the air for a long period of time - patina. With the colours ranging all the way from a dark red to a cold light green.
Not sure as to how true this is, but from what I observed patina begins to form in parts with creases in sculptures (armpits, between fingers, nostrils, wrinkles, etc.); so you can try and use that to your advantage (it will be kind of irritating for a beginner though, I reckon).

Here's my take on this:


1. Plan out how everything's going to look (don't leave room for ambiguity), so that later on as you progress with the piece you don't run into unexpected problems that are going to waste your time and force you to come up with a half-assed solution on the spot.
 This stage, along with the second one which I'll get to in a second, is the most important one as it allows you to fix mistakes and think in advanced about what you're going to add before it spirals into something you don't want.

2. Figure out where your your light source is, where shadows are cast, and what colours you're going to use. The first colour your should figure out is your background colour (or if you have a background, you should figure out how it'll look first), I went with a somewhat desaturated blue to contrast with the bronze. The bronze itself should be much darker than how you depicted it in my opinion (bronze is a rather dark metal).
The colours I went with are a dark green-ish colour for the shadow (to create a vague simulation of patina), and a desaturated brown for the mid-tone (the main colour).

3. Add in some light - start to create a 3D form.
Just as a side note: I really don't like using dithering to the extent that I have in that edit; but in this case it was just a case of not wanting to add another colour for what is basically a single transition (colour control nomsayin).

4. Add in the highlights (remember to keep them sparse though, to give it a metally feel).

5. Add in the darkest and lightest colours in order to emphasise on those areas (this is mainly just something I like to do; I feel that in order to create a balanced palette, the single lightest and darkest colours most be used the least - imagine it kind of like a graph showing the use of colours, with the darkest and lightest colours on the edges of the graph being used the least and the mid-tone, in the middle of the graph, being used the most).

6. Add reflections, this is kind of pointless with bronze, but it doesn't take away from the piece if used carefully.

[Rosier]

You need more shadows, everything has equal visual priority right now

The perspective on the arms needs a bit of work. The rest of the piece suggests he's facing left at a slight angle. In contrast the arms look almost the same which would suggest he's facing directly forward.

Added purple to make the furnaces pop out a bit more, and hopefully fixed the arm perspective on the arms. 


@Night, I want the bright, shiny side of copper rather than the dull, faded side.  I'll keep that in mind in case I decide to go dark on another sprite, though, thanks.

[Conzeit]

k, so I know you're basically going from no shading to shading here, therefore making a  reflective surface specially one that takes as much subtlety as bronze is too much (you just had to go straight to metal didnt ya?) What you have does not look like metal at all, but it's good enough for now I think.

I thought the chrysler building would make it really clear, but you still dont know what I mean by making a design for the furnaces.
look at these, the smallest arches have 3 holes, each hole could be a furnace, then you have an extra hole below and it would look cool.

When you design that furnace shape, you probably want to temporarily eliminate all the shading, and just look at a black sprite with white holes, that way you know you're not being distracted by all the detail.

Your fire is just as bright and saturated as your gold and that will not do. Fire is a lightsource while gold is not, you have to make it lighter somehow.
I went and designed something myself, just white or black holes like this would actually be better than what you have, there is no distinguishing anything that's going on in your chest right now.
see how the fire here is emanating from the opposite source than the light, that creates contrast. You cannot have fire with shades similar to your gold because it'll all blend together. This animated version has a less saturated gold for that purpose.

Also, these have a lot less stuff going on, I pixeled most things iwth a 2x2 brush

Now for the Bronze, the reference posted here was lovely

But trying to achieve that in pixels this small, specially ones meant to be animated is madness. So I just went for the dark metal with red-ish highlights. as I shaded it I was thinking the same way I would've as if it were black metal.

I actually made it before the gold one,gold one is the same with some shades shifted around.
that sillouething light (a secondary lightsource coming from the borders) is a very easy way to achieve that reflective look. But I want to show some other ways it can be done

This is a good, simple example of dark shiny material from Galaxy Fight

This is a metal guy from Waku Waku. This one  just has really contrasted highlights right next to the shadows, that is the easiest way to fake metal, going right from lightest highlight (specular) to darkest (core) shadow.

Galaxy Fight and Waku Waku make good starting points for shading, good volume, no overcomplication...as I keep saying over and over :p

This guy is an example by me of that aproach. See his big metal fist? all I did was put a big bold core shadow right next to the higlight and BAM metal.


some more really simpy shaded metal objects by me for Deathroad to Canada

EDIT: I just had to bring St0ven's brass monkey into the party =)

You should look at proko's shading video for tips on shading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3WmrWUEIJo and maybe Arne's tutorial http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm#materials and if you really want to get deeper on how light works you can look at the "itchy animation" light tutorial http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm


After messing with your sprite for a while  I felt bad I couldnt really call it my own and made my own take at your idea. I know you probably werent going for tron-lines for furnaces :p

This is my full proces+refference file on this. You'll notice there are several frames that are just black with the white furnaces, that's to make sure I'm focused on getting that right. You should've probably designed the furnaces before you ever started shading

[Gil]

Conceit, that post is wonderful!

[Joe]

Hold up. Night's example is the bronziest in the thread by far, you shouldn't just brush it off like that. First the colors can easily be tweaked to a higher key. Second, he outlined a process resulting in a balanced sprite.
The biggest issue with your sprite right now is its focus on the parts (delineating every single muscle) rather than the whole, resulting in a busy sprite. Everything is lit uniformly and there's no sense of priority.
Another suggestion is to draw the legs without the loincloth and then paint it on, because it doesn't seem like they're attaching as strongly as other legs in the thread, like the top half is teetering. I would either thicken the obliques or the abductors, or both.
Hope that helps, your sprite's coming along quite nicely.

And yea the other thing I like about Conceit's that he didn't mention is it's looming, hunched over, like a giant would be doing.

[Conzeit]

Gil: thanks! I know rosier wants to learn but sometimes gets overwhelmed so I wanted to do somthing easy to get but still full of resources 

Joe: Knowing Rosier  I think he is not currently even considering doing bronze since it's one of his first takes at shading...he listens to crits but only so far
I felt my post was needed because although Night's is lovely I dont really see a lot of people being able to animate something like that, specially not Rosier that's starting out on shading, but his shades and sense of contrast could totally be applied by Rosier.Thanks for the hunching over thing....it just felt right you know ? :p

[Night]

Night's example is the bronziest in the thread by far

Night's is lovely

 

Didn't realise the sprite's supposed to be animated, my bad - it is kind of a bit too much for animation I agree. However the process of creation can still be applied (I sense that my post was just a tad too overwhelming for Rosier).

[Rosier]

TBH, I have no intention of animating something this complicated for a while.  There's a reason all my animations at the moment are all one shade.  Not to mention finding examples might be a tad bit harder than a human...



Anyway, I wound up with this.  It's kind of a mix of both Night's and Conceit's, though Night's is mostly the shading in certain parts.  I also kept the brighter bronze in addition, cause I do still like it, though straight fire rather than this ambientness(?) does make it harder to read.  I tried for a red-orange-yellow gradient spreading out from the center, but this was a lot cleaner.


Got rid of the furnaces having doors that opened, and just left it as constantly glowing.  And while not quite Tron lines, the shoulders, wrists and heels are now open to exposing the fire, and the ribcage area is visibly hollow and also spewing fire.  If the fire were to go out, it would be visible that this is a hollow statue with several places open.

[pistachio]

Damn, that's a major step up from where this started. Challenging yourself to stick closer to our takes now, which were stylistically massively different from yours, is the way to do it.

But I see you took some visual elements from the latest and turned it into visual noise.
Here I want to see the noise cut down, I.E. simplify the furnaces and speculars.
Also more core shadows formed by plane changes. Conceit's did that, Night did that and I did that.

Here's an edit with some ideas from all 3.

[Rosier]

Smoke everywhere.

I kind of want the furnaces, at least the main ones, to make noise, considering that's Number 1 on the list next to being made of bronze.  Plus there has to be seven distinguishable ones on the chest.  I toned down the rest of the outlets, though, plus added more shadows, especially in the stomach region