[CC] Working on a series of pixel portraits!

[vleize]

So, I've been working on getting back into pixel art these past couple of weeks, and I threw together these icons of some of my characters. I'm pretty out of touch with how to stylistically approach doing art in such a small space, so any advice is welcome! I decided to start with just some headshots because it was a lot less daunting than working on full characters, lol.

I'm also nnnnot completely sold on some of my colour choices, though I think overall they have something similar to what I want the final images to look like. Working with a reduced colour pallet was probably one of the hardest things because I'm far more familiar with painting and the like

(Oh! And because I know it may not be suuper obvious with portraits, the second character from the left is a bat, and the middle character is a lion!)

[MysteryMeat]

Actually, I recognized the bat character before I saw you mention it. She reads pretty fine, good work there!
As for color choices, I really don't know! The ones you have right now give everything a vaguely mature look, like faded renaissance paintings. This works well with the semi-realistic style you're rolling with.
The dithering in some places might need some touch ups but for the most part it also adds to that and gives the skin some texture, it's very easy to imagine these scaled up into non-pixel portraits.

I think the biggest problem area is the lines in some places, right now everything here has a slight jaggy look that detracts from the end result a bit. Do another pass over your various curves and see if you can tweak the curves to be more smooth. To point out some of the examples I mean, the rightmost elf girl's hair needs some very slight tweaking along the outline and so does the far-right girl's curly coat fluff!

[vleize]

Thanks very much for the reply, MysteryMeat!

Oh, awesome! I think it's sort of a case of staring at the bat girl for too long, haha. Sometimes I feel she looks more like a rabbit (which might be due to the nose... she always looks right when I draw her traditionally or whatever).

Aaaaaah, well thank you! I am a fan of that style of traditional painting, haha. I think I might try to explore some other styles that could work with the setting of the project, because I think some of the complexities with the characters are sort of tripping me up when it comes to the lines. Especially the more complicated designs. I'll definitely see if i can fix them up a bit before I try something different though!

[32]

I think all you need to do is drop the dithering and work on your outlines. Right now it's a lot of harsh single pixel outlines. If you play with your line weight and AA them they'll look a lot nicer. Try not to use every shade in every region of colour, let some areas be darker and some lighter according to the light source. Especially in the hair and especially on the lion.

They all have solid drawings as a foundation and interesting characters so just work on the pixel tech and these should look really nice

Edit: Did a quick edit.

[vleize]

Thanks very much for the advice, 32! I've gone back and made some adjustments:



Getting rid of the dithering felt weird lol. Though I think that might be because it goes against how you'd normally want to blend colours outside of pixel art which I'm far more familiar with, haha. I'm still not 100% on it, but I do think that it looks better.

[MysteryMeat]

It's a bit strange here, actually. I think the dithering was what pushed that somewhat painterly vibe as now i get more of a cartoonish celshading vibe off it.

[32]

I think they're looking much nicer. If you want to blend colours just add more or search for other entries in your palette that would work, once you get used to it you'll see where you can bring in colours from other parts of the image to blend and create interesting unified palettes and not end up with a crazy number of colours. I wouldn't worry about colour count too much though.

Dithering as a way of blending colour is really something to only be used in very specific cases where the colours are fairly close together or you want a particular texture (or you're displaying specifically on a blurry screen). Ordered dither is basically a big patch of banding that makes the pixels/resolution very obvious which is generally something you want to try to avoid.

[API-Beast]

Small note here; using dithering for blending does work, but only if the two colors were very similar in the first place, else it reads as texture, not as blending. "Smooth" pixel art requires a bit of practice, especially in choosing colors.