Pixel Art Wiki

[ptoing]

Three colours, yeah? There are some very high gloss metals and stuff like metalic paint, but even those need a few more shades especially if you have curved surfaces.

And I think hapiel is correct with his last sentence, it is a wiki written from your subjective perspective and lacks objectivity.

[ErekT]

Hehe. Well to be fair you could represent that with 3 colors and get the idea across. Or 4, or 20, or three thousand etc. Hapiel and Ptoing make good points. Best not be dogmatic about this stuff. Many many different types of metal surfaces, light conditions to illuminate them, and art styles to represent them with. Instead, maybe word it something like "one (often-used?) method to represent metal surfaces is to divide them into three main shades of high contrast etc"?

[ptoing]

Better would be to have a couple of example pieces by different artists which show good metal surfaces, and then perhaps a couple of shaded spheres with different amount of colours and lighting situations. Just saying: "Here, these are good metal colours, use 3 shades, bam.", is not helpful.

[tcaud]

Three colours, yeah? There are some very high gloss metals and stuff like metalic paint, but even those need a few more shades especially if you have curved surfaces.

And I think hapiel is correct with his last sentence, it is a wiki written from your subjective perspective and lacks objectivity.

That's not spray painted metal.

This is.



And I spy three shades.

I know you want to think I'm some kind of idiot, or overall not as intelligent as you, but it's really not a good idea. For one thing, you know nothing about me. For all you know, I'm one of the most if not the most intelligent individual alive. Whether I am or not, it's really not a good idea to underestimate me, as it tends to result in major humiliation on the part of the underestimator, which results in turn in lost reputation and attitude hardening which tends to trigger descent into delusional disconnect, among other psychological maladies.

By the by, you might want to stick around for a particularly good show I intend to put on at Bugzilla tonight. You'll need to do some catching up to understand what's happening, but it'll be worth the price of admission I assure you.

[PixelPiledriver]

You asked for critique about the wiki.
People are giving suggestions that would improve it.
Based on what you stated your intentions of the wiki are, the current content doesn't fit that well.
You're bringing a lot of emotion and opinion based information into many of the articles.
If the purpose of the wiki has evolved to be a place where you write about stuff, and not an educational source, that's fine.
But it would be better to recognize that and ask for critique based on that perspective.

[tcaud]

I think a lot of amateur pixel artists (read: people who like drawing NES sprites) would find the painted metal perspective rather useful. If I didn't think it a useful epiphany I wouldn't have written about it. You need to understand that a lot of people who like pixel art will never have the mastery of form required to say, shade clothing accurately. They don't have the ability because they lack fundamental interest in the actual process of considering how one fold determines another fold. These simple rules are enough for them to shade small sprites, which is all they should quite frankly ever aspire to (and all they will ever stick with besides). If everyone had talent in the visual arts, there wouldn't be anywhere near as many demos and half-baked engines with bad art. But if we can just raise the caliber of that bad art a little bit, I think it'll be worth it.

[PixelPiledriver]

Also please be mindful of Rule #1.

[Jeremy]

I think a lot of amateur pixel artists (read: people who like drawing NES sprites) would find the painted metal perspective rather useful. If I didn't think it a useful epiphany I wouldn't have written about it. You need to understand that a lot of people who like pixel art will never have the mastery of form required to say, shade clothing accurately. They don't have the ability because they lack fundamental interest in the actual process of considering how one fold determines another fold. These simple rules are enough for them to shade small sprites, which is all they should quite frankly ever aspire to (and all they will ever stick with besides). If everyone had talent in the visual arts, there wouldn't be anywhere near as many demos and half-baked engines with bad art. But if we can just raise the caliber of that bad art a little bit, I think it'll be worth it.

That wiki says "The ArseGA palette is an excellent choice for metals, employing an appropriate distance between shades". That doesn't make any sense! Are you saying you should only pixel metal surfaces with that palette? Or that you should grab a ramp from that palette when pixelling metal? Either way they're hypersaturated; not easy at the best of times let alone when just starting out with PA. The paint by numbers type of tutorial you're trying to find and collate are nowhere near as useful as general art/colour theory, maybe with some pixel-specific issues to deal with.

Oh, and flat walls are all very well and good, but that's not what the world is made from (even disregarding obvious colour reflections)

[ErekT]

These simple rules are enough for them to shade small sprites, which is all they should quite frankly ever aspire to (and all they will ever stick with besides). If everyone had talent in the visual arts, there wouldn't be anywhere near as many demos and half-baked engines with bad art. But if we can just raise the caliber of that bad art a little bit, I think it'll be worth it.

Know thy limits isn't a mindset to be encouraged imo. Anyone can learn to become a pretty good artist I think, at least technically, just as anyone can learn to read or pick up a new language. If they're not willing to learn because of lack of a fundamental interest or whatever tho, well tough shit. You can't expect to be good at anything if you can't be arsed to put the effort into learning the ropes. Shortcuts will at best give people a limited and inflexible skillset and maybe also a false sense of security along the lines of "yeh I can do something that looks a bit like that with my bag o tricks", that stunts their development.

[Helm]

As I said before, foundations matter. You must understand the standard before you can begin to rebel against it.

What is becoming increasingly apparent is that whereas this is true, you're not setting foundations based on historic research but based on your own opinions. And we can shoot down these opinions all day and maybe that's useful to you but it's not a good foundation for an objective, informed wiki.