Pixelation

Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: Sequential76 on July 05, 2010, 03:33:07 am

Title: Spawn
Post by: Sequential76 on July 05, 2010, 03:33:07 am
Hello, I got into pixel art a few months ago to make games with a friend. I've been visiting pixelation alot lately so here's some pixel art I've done. At least the stuff I'm alowed to show. They're mostly practice and misc web tutorials. :crazy: I'm always open to critiques.

(http://www.sequential76.com/pixelart/Atourney%20Wrassler.png)

(http://www.sequential76.com/pixelart/Isoroof.png)

Learning to walk, the first is me triing to wing it, just to see what I could do without reading up. :-[
(http://www.sequential76.com/pixelart/intuitivewalk.gif)

The second I used an arc movement path with contact, recoil, passing and high point key frames.

(http://www.sequential76.com/pixelart/walk.gif)

I've been reading through al my issues of Spawn, I'm up to issue 62 and it's the inspiraton for this one.

(http://www.sequential76.com/pixelart/spawnpixel.gif)
Title: Re: Spawn
Post by: FRAWG on July 08, 2010, 01:19:27 pm
1st one: It looks really nice! There are a few things i would change, such as the lighting/shading, which is odd in some places. You could've done with a few less colors, but that's alright. Some anti aliasing would be nice.

I don't have many other problems with these. Except the Learning to Walk one, which i see was an EARLY pixel art, before you had learned to make animations nicely like the second one.
Title: Re: Spawn
Post by: big brother on July 08, 2010, 06:34:27 pm
The first image reminds me a little bit of the character from Derek Yu's sprite tutorial:
(http://www.derekyu.com/images/extras/lucha-finished.gif)

It's nuts that you would come up with the same character independently of each other! I guess great minds think alike!
Title: Re: Spawn
Post by: zanaril on July 08, 2010, 07:10:09 pm
Considering that he said what he was posting was made following web tutorials, I don't think it's too far of a stretch to imagine that he drew the same character because that was the tutorial he used.  It looks like his drawing skills are already good, and he's practicing the style rather than trying to make an original piece.

I think your main focus need to be linework. The first image is messy, and especially around the muscles the lines are dividing up the shapes too sharply. You seem to have made the mistake of just drawing large scale in MS Paint, rather than focusing on the actual pixels.Maybe you should try something smaller so you can really work on getting everything polished.

The first wak cycle is a bit odd - looks like a zombie stumbling along. But the leg movement for part of it looks pretty smooth.

On te second one, the legs need to straighten out more before the feet meet the ground - unless you wanted him to be stomping? (In which case, you need a bit of a pause after each step...  :))
Title: Re: Spawn
Post by: Jad on July 09, 2010, 07:23:29 am
Big Brother, I don't really think Sequential went into a pixel forum filled to the brim with people who have read a pixel tutorial or twenty, expecting that no one would recognize the character.

On the contrary, I think he failed to mention it because he supposed everyone would recognize it.

I might be wrong about this, but hey, I'll just decide that that's how it is! Anyways, make sure to mention references in the future. To avoid crazy shenanigans!
Title: Re: Spawn
Post by: Helm on July 09, 2010, 02:57:57 pm
Yeah I took it as common knowledge. And even if it was not, it's not like he ripped anything, come on. If someone showed us their picture of batman in here would someone go 'OMG, REFERENCES!!'.

Basically, BigBrother's post here is needless and semi-flamebait even if he didn't mean it like that.

As far as critique goes, right now you're not doing good pixel art, you're just painting with pixels. But you know how to draw which is a plus for this sort of thing and you also seem to digest and learn fast.

(http://www.locustleaves.com/AW.gif)

In my opinion, pixel art is about precisely made pixel clusters (groups of a same color of pixels) and how they interact. In the grace in which the connecting clusters form shapes and contours a piece of art made of pixels becomes great pixel art. To explain why I chose the clusters I chose to let live and why I killed others, I'd have to explain all my aesthetic theory on pixel art, which I'm trying to do elsewhere on Pixelation (http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=8110.0). I don't know how much use looking at my edit without having digested the Ramblethread would do to you. I suggest you look at the edit in your animation program, flip through the original and the edit and every time you wonder why I changed this or that, try to not chalk it up to style and different aesthetic aspriations (which is correct, but disregard it for now) but instead think of just about the value of pixels and why some must be sacrificed for others to be beautiful.