Hope you don't mind another novella-sized reply. I tend to ramble on a bit and my tendency to provide (written) examples with everything doesn't really help there. Just give me a (digital) slap if you want me to tone it down a little.
Indeed. I tend to have this problem a lot.
(I make music! But it's not that good...)
It shouldn't be too bad to continue with this project though. After getting back into pixel art and actually knowing what I'm doing, it's become much more enjoyable and I actually have the motivation to finish it!
(Thanks to all of you, of course! )
It's a pretty common problem when it comes to creative stuff--whether art or music or writing (or whatever other creative pursuit)--that tends to get acerbated when in a digital environment because computers make it so
easy to put incomplete stuff away with the thought of 'will get back to it later' and because things remain malleable to a great degree. Whereas with some of the non-digital creative pursuits you're far more bound to physical limitations both regarding the 'how' and the 'when'. (e.g. you can't really decide in the middle of mixing paints to get the right shade that 'oh well, this isn't what I want but I'm gonna use it and replace all of these drab browns with a more vivid shade later' and if you keep hopping from stone sculpture project to stone sculpture project, eventually you're going to run out of room to put those darn half-finished rocks in)
Yes! Definitely! I will continue to tweak it before i begin shading the main body of the ship + adding in the small details. (I don't want it to be just blue, of course! It'll look boring that way, unless it has really good shading, which I don't think I'll be good enough at till I get enough practise. But Anyways.)
Aye, practice helps a lot. Tweaking is good, but you'll eventually notice that just because colours look good as a ramp doesn't
necessarily mean they'll also work as intended in an actual piece of art. Don't get discouraged if you find you have to tweak your ramps a little again when you get to shading and detailing.
Nearby colours influence the perception of other colours a lot, so what looks one way on an organized monochromatic light-to-dark ramp may give off a different look when surrounded also by colours from your other colour ramps, or when surrounded by colours with a wildly different saturation.
For example, if you put a red with low saturation (so tending a lot towards grey) among a bunch of pure greys, it'll appear pink/red-like by contrast. (Indeed, if you've got a low-saturation piece of art, putting any highly-saturated shades among them will generally look very, very jarring. Like "eek, my eyes are burning if I stare at that shade too long!" jarring, sometimes) Put that exact same low-saturation red among a lot of highly-saturated colours (red or otherwise) and it'll look very, very grey.
Ah yes! I changed the hue just to make it as light as I could while still keeping it, um, looking "blue", if you get what i mean. I have a question about this though; Should I consistently change the hue as I decrease saturation, or chunks?
Edit:
I ended up doing just that, and I kinda like how it came out!
Think you may be mixing up 'hue' and 'value' and 'saturation' here. Value is how light or dark a colour is. High value means close to white, low value means close to black. Hue is which shade it has (so, blue, or purple-ish blue or magenta or cyan or yellow--etc.) and saturation is how close or far it is from being grey. No saturation=greyscale; high saturation=bright colour.
As to changing hue alongside value and/or saturation: sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on what you're drawing, what kind of shading, what sort of light, etc. In this case, it works, at least in part because all your blues are really just depicting
one blue--the jet/engine--that appears different due to light and shadows. Perhaps not the clearest way to explain it. Think of it this way: if the airship was a real, physical object, it'd have the same blue paint used across its body. Which parts look lighter and darker isn't something innate to said body, but dependent on if, how strong and where light hits it. It's not that someone painted the left side with a lighter paint than the right side, or that it got some sort of damage or staining resulting in one side being darker. It's the same material all across. It's just not the same
light all across.
Sometimes, however, you use a colour ramp to depict multiple
different "blues" (or greens, or yellows or whatever). Say, rather than a space-ship alone, you're depicting a full scene...and maybe other than the metallic-paintcoat of the jet's body, there's also the woollen sweater with three shades of blue stripes an off-duty crewbie is wearing. And oh my, look, someone used some blue spray paint to leave some off-colour ditties on the walls of the spacedock, claiming the only reason the capt'n has such a large ship is to compensate for something .
In that case, you may well still have a single colour-ramp of your blue-shades, but while some are probably used for more than one, maybe even every blue, you may also have shades that are used for only one or two blues, and when arranging purely on a light-to-dark order, saturation and hue may flit back and forth a bit more because of the different ways light and shadows interacts with different materials. (Dark blue wool won't brightly reflect light the way metallic paint does, for one) Or maybe not and you just have a simple, short ramp of blue shades all of which are reused across every blue. It all depends on the exact piece of art.
There's also artistic concerns that may influence things: maybe you're experimenting with a wildly different style. Or for whichever reason, you've taken up a challenge to create a full scene in just 8 colours and you really can't spare more than three on the blues and that's if one doubles for "black" as well. You're making something within the limitations of some of the old consoles. You plan to fully animate the image, making keeping the colour-count down a real good idea. You're going for a "washed out picture" effect. You're going for a bright cartoony feel. You're doing something surrealistic.
So, to summarize: it can work (and in this case does, mostly*), but there really isn't a "one way works for every piece of art". It depends on many considerations, both on an artistic level and regarding the material and lighting you're depicting.
*mostly: your darkest two shades of blue in your newest ramp could do with either some increased contrast, merging or removal of one, though as you don't seem to currently even
use the darkest shade, I'd lean towards merging/removal myself.