Pixelation

Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: michelcote on January 04, 2011, 06:58:57 am

Title: palette WIP + drawings c+c
Post by: michelcote on January 04, 2011, 06:58:57 am
Hi everyone!
I'm Mike, long time lurker and first time sharing my own art here.  I'm pretty post-shy and pretty art-shy but I take criticism well.  I want to learn!
SO.  I doodled this with the idea of trying to come up with some mock-ups for a project I want to work on.  My goal here is to come up with a 16-colour palette to draw all of the character and environment art needed.  I don't have any particular strict limitations as far as hardware or anything like that goes, I just want something that looks good and will be fun to play with.  Here's what I have so far.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v601/oatmeal1209/WIPpalette.png)

So yeah, the palette is something I threw together on the fly and didn't really put much thought into as I was going along.  So far I like the yellows, browns, and greens I'm using.  The dark blue and grey look too similar, I may drop one of those.  All the characters I made use 5 colours each.  Black is the only colour that isn't used here, so that one is completely open to become a new colour.  Might come in handy though, who knows.
For the characters, I seem to have fallen into the same problem as I always do when pixeling, which is that they look alright zoomed-in, and not so much at 100% or 200%.  The character directly beside the horse and the larger one at the bottom with the axe bother me quite a bit.  The top one just needs to be redone entirely, and the facial hair on the bottom one needs some work.  Also, the child looks... generic?  Not sure what word I wanna use here, she just looks plain.
Any comments or discussion about colour selection would be greatly appreciated as well.
So yeah!   :D
Title: Re: palette WIP + drawings c+c
Post by: Sardone on January 05, 2011, 09:23:28 am
Withish skin anf blonde hair can be a bad idea, also the greens aren't greens.  :-X

Most importantly you need more contrast and a background.

(http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/3705/pltt.png)

Lovely style  :)
Title: Re: palette WIP + drawings c+c
Post by: Glak on January 05, 2011, 11:21:53 am
I actually like the white skin and pale, desaturated colors.  It gives it a dreamy, whimsical feel.  I agree that we should see some backgrounds though.
Title: Re: palette WIP + drawings c+c
Post by: michelcote on January 05, 2011, 07:12:01 pm
Thanks for the input guys, I really appreciate it!

I know my greens aren't greens, but they look green lol.  Cool edits Sardone!  It's neat seeing style choices I wouldn't have thought of on my little dudes.  Comparing yours to the originals made me notice a few issues I had with AA, and some areas on the characters that weren't very readable.  Glak described what I'm going for almost perfectly.  I don't want to oversaturate everything and completely change the "feel" of what I have going here.

Right now I'm jumping between my sketchbook and my laptop, trying to simultaneously design these characters by hand and trying to translate them to pixel as I go along.  You guys are both right though, I should start pumping out some background tile ideas.  Thanks!
Title: Re: palette WIP + drawings c+c
Post by: dreadpirate on January 07, 2011, 11:36:24 pm
The horse is astonishing. I would love to see it animated. Something about teeny-tiny sprites, I find just great. It all looks a little like Cave Story, yes?
Title: Re: palette WIP + drawings c+c
Post by: michelcote on January 08, 2011, 05:36:14 am
The horse is astonishing. I would love to see it animated. Something about teeny-tiny sprites, I find just great. It all looks a little like Cave Story, yes?
A little bit, yes.  I like making my characters a bit dynamic.  It's both cool to look at and easier to draw   :)