Interesting take on the head. You've given my saws depth and weight, and the blood is a better shade. Cool edit.
blood is red and we all know that, but usually just making things from the color spretty dark and adding a lot of red isn't enough to make it scary.
That confused me a bit, do you mean that just making everything dark red isn't enough to make it scary? Yours seems to be primarily yellow-orange, almost like a Warcraft-esque ogre. Whatever changes I make, I still want it to be a very red sprite, like he's made of bloody muscle tissue with no skin on top.
The contrast problem is endemic to my work, and I am working (struggling, really) to pinpoint what makes it happen. It is
not a conscious decision. Perhaps it's too much space consumed by dark colors. Or the lack of an outline around the dark shades.
Or I'm choosing my light shades poorly, and rendering the sprite with those not-light-enough highlights in mind.
My monitor is a Proscan telivision, which may very well be the culprit. Perhaps a short term solution is to compare my stuff with pixel art that has strong, effective contrast, then adjusting my palette throughout the rendering process accordingly.
Regarding noise, there's an ugliness granted by noisy single-pixel details I actually like, but that doesn't lend itself to animation and as such I am indeed moving away from it.
Palette experimentsAlright, something's gotta give with the contrast. Time for YOLO palette experimentation:
Not as good as Cyangmou's contrast, but it's closer I think.
- Like the new head? It and the clothes are WIP again.
- Fewer and smaller ambiguous clusters
- Slowly working out the noise
10.1.14Better, but more divergent palette:
Head's on the way. Color count ended up at 11 rather than 16. For lols check out the rope around his neck up close. Fuuugly. At 1x it somehow looks brown, at least with the second palette
10.2 - Contrast musingsMay have discovered two components of my contrast problem. My background color, regardless of hue, is always at exactly 120 lightness. looking around, I notice that others tend to use a significantly brighter color, usually well above 140. My background being dark would explain why poor contrast feels alright sometimes. My monitor is also a 32 inch television, and relatively close to my face. When I shade from across the room, all the contrast gripes begin to occur to me as well; my palette tweaks are far more successful when I work from across the room. Problem is my Wacom doesn't reach far enough, so I have to draw with a mouse instead, but I'll deal with it if it means I can better my contrast
I've also got to get more brave regarding placing very dark shades right next to very light shades. My instinct is to shade very softly.
Even more contrast: