Yeah, I've actually started to use a couple action figures that I have that have some moving parts and this is good for some things.

One thing I notice about where my struggle is, it's in the way the appendages and 'outards' of the body move as the action is being executed.

So it's easy enough to get a reference and stills of a side view of a flying kick, but it's much harder to get the 'windup' action poses and frames correctly. So if a fighter is running into a jump kick, those moments right before, as, and during the air before the full extensions of the feet seem to be the hardest for me to accurately portray, and also seem to be the hardest to find references for.

This is why I really like the site Kasumi posted, since it shows the full animation of idle -> windup -> action, something that would be pretty difficult to get right on a mannequin. Only problem I have with that site is the videos are flash and I have to convert them an rip the frames which is a bit tedious. And they have limited animations, so clever, tricky, 'super' and gimmicky fighting moves are not featured.

Don't underestimate the power of acting things out for yourself. This is how I get 90% of my reference, finding videos is hard, standing up is easy. Even just doing the actions will give you a sense of what the movements are. If you have a mirror or a camera even better

I've done this for a few actions, but imagine trying to self pose for a flying kick! 

Hi All,

Been apart of the community for some time but not very outspoken individual. I've had a couple works critiqued and have learned a lot about general Sprite/Pixel art development and creation.

Right now I'm pretty deep into development and need to start turning out a lot of animations because I'm working on a fighting style game. I probably choose the hardest genre for pixel art since it requires tons upon tons of animations and variety but there's no deadline and I'm in no real rush to produce a product.

That being said, I'm still active and working on characters and enemies. The issue I'm having is that it's hard to find references for very specific and detailed actions. For example if I want a flying kick from the side scrolling perspective (this has been hard for me to find).

I wonder if anyone knows of any kind of repo that has lots of different fighting moves animated out from the side scrolling view, or of any kind of 3D program maybe where I can record the screen and then break out the frames.

In general I'm using Google and finding any image or old game sprites to reference and use for character anatomy and positioning, but I thought I'd put an ear to the ground for a better solution.

You have a pretty decent start.

Basically the reason your curves do not look so good is because of the solid black outline.

I understand you don't want to use sprites so that you can work on your own style, BUT it's super important to still look at sprites!
In this one you can see how black is only used on the bottom shadowy areas instead of all the way around. And on places where light hits they use brighter colors and break up the outline to create anti-aliasing.

Hi All,

I'm a relatively recent member of Pixelation and I love the community and forum layout, but I feel like it leaves something to be wanted when concerning WIP part of the site.

I made a proposal on Stack Exchange Area51 to create a Pixel Art Q/A sub site: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/86270/pixel-art?referrer=gRUDLZsR5CvrHNoc4LZ2-g2

If you go to the link, sign up and support the proposal, we could expand the community into a great Q/A site that can really help everyone advance in their art work!

Hope you all like the idea and support it!