I'm working on this big monster of an Stream overlay piece. I got the gems the way I want and now for twisting dragon for the top holding the gems in the mouths. Could use a bit of pointers on the positioning of the dragon heads, aswell as the bottom part right now I just have a filler.

forgot how to post a pic. ( sorry

Here's how I do sand dunes.. Notice the patterns in the sand, not trying to self promote only trying to give you a reference to help you with Pixelating sand dunes

So the first thing I want to cover in this CC is Line-work, Line-work is the basic building block for nearly all pixel art.
_{(all sprite work, some people use a technique called Blocking http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299 I highly recommend reading all of this thoroughly it covers nearly everything.)}

So what exactly differentiates good line-work from bad line-work?

Well I won't talk too much about this but I will show you a few examples.

Ex1: Jaggies


jaggy lines area major problem with newer artists sprites. You should always make sure your lines are clean and smooth.
As you can see the line on the right is much smoother and represents almost the same shape. There are rare occasions where jaggies are acceptable (Rocks sometimes)

Ex2: AA'ing


It stands for Anti-Alias and it is used to smooth out edges. I may be the worlds worst AAer so my example is actually pretty darn bad, there is some mathematical equation to it that I don't understand maybe someone here could enlighten me actually, I would recommend looking at the link posted above and reading the section on AAing.

Lastly: Banding


Banding is what happens when you have strips of pixels the mirror each other as you can see on the left the pixels are hugging each other, and you can see how much better it looks without this banding/hugging.

Given this how can we improve the line-work that you made?

Lets get rid of those colours and get this line-work down.

There now given what we just learned lets fix it!_{(AA and banding won't do anything for us right now because you can't AA a transparent sprite.)}


Okay so I made some adjustments and I will explain all of them.

• Now I understand that the sprite was supposed to be flying, But I don't think this is a good idea as it makes more sense to make him in a standing position.
• The ball was way too small so I enlarged it and placed it in his other hand.
• His head was may too large for his body so I made it smaller and changed the shape so he doesn't have a balloon head
• I gave him a JRPG like hair style (you should practice hair styles its good to learn if you want to be a spriter)
• got rid of his lego claw hand(dont attempt to draw hands at this small of sprites )

The main problem with your sprite was the head it was completely 2-D. Even though its only line-work at this point you can still see the difference in perspective between my rendition and yours. Now this is not to discourage you at all in fact I didn't change all too much I just had to move a few things around. I worked completely off your sprite.

So that brings us into my next topic...

Perspective and Depth!

Now you can clearly see that the title there popped out of the page. I believe the best place to start if you have trouble with depth and perspective is drawing 3-D letters cubes and shapes.



Start with drawing straight up cubes then move on to different shapes of cubes and styles. I like to draw my cubes swurvy like this, its requires a bit more thinking then Straight up and down cubes like below (psssst Its also funner)



This cube is in an isometric form drawing in this style is also another way to improve at getting your depth and perspective down. (it can also get confusing and troubling at times) here's a good isometric tutorial for you:
http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/isometric_pixelart_tutorial_mathematics_of_isometrics.php

Okay and last but certainly not least is the colouring!

First things first lets take a look at your palette


The palette is pretty darn good and colours and palette making is a weak point of mine so the only thing I have to say about it is that the greyscale ramp and green ramp that branch off of the donut is completely unnecessary and I wouldn't recommend doing that in the future (unless greyscale is needed) another thing to avoid is using 100% black or 100% white. Though some outlines on sprites 100% black is acceptable.

So now that that is all out of the way we can finally get down to colouring this bad boy!


So first of all try to not use more then 2 colours per body part especially for a sprite this small it really only needs 7 or 6 colours. You have 1 base colour and 1 darker colour for every body part and you should reuse colours, for example the dark colour in his jersey is the same as the light colour in his jeans. This is hard to explain but certain colours interact differently when presented with different partner colours. So when the colour is looked at with the lighter green it appears to be a darker green tone, and then when mixed with the dark blue it appears as a light blue. Again you'll see some examples of this in the pixel art tutorial that I linked in the very beginning, make sure you read that. ill link it down here for convenience http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299

You might have also noticed that his ball is missing. This is because a pro spriter would never attach his ball sprite to his character sprite, That way the sprite can be moved around independent from the Character.

Thanks for reading if you are down here took me almost all night to get this done. Keep practising and follow what I taught you! Pixel art takes a long time and takes a lot of patience but anyone can do it with lots of practice. Keep at it 

Sorry for that AA example as it was terrible here is a better one for you because I did a very very bad job on that...


Also avoid AAing unless its absolutely needed

 

He didn't post it to show off he posted it to help you It is incredible work, but you should try his technique and try to replicate it in your ships