Pixelation

Critique => Pixel Art => Pixel Art Feature Chest => Topic started by: zealcore on September 02, 2013, 06:52:08 pm

Title: GR#135 - Help with Shading a Character - Shading
Post by: zealcore on September 02, 2013, 06:52:08 pm
Hi, guys. So basically I drew this character and I have it animated (I did the animation by hand on paper and then made a pixel art image). It's a character for a game I've been developing. I don't have any idea how to make it look better and I'm a beginner at shading. This looks like a great community so I thought someone with skill would give me a hand, perhaps?

(http://i.imgur.com/o3D7B0e.png)
Title: Re: Help with shading a character
Post by: YellowLime on September 02, 2013, 09:52:10 pm
The most important advice I can give you is that this is too big of a size for pixelart. It would be too much work to make it look good!

You could instead create the graphics of your game in another medium, either digital-painting or vector-based (latter might be harder)

If you insist on doing it in pixelart, you should reduce the size (to around 64x64) and duplicate or triplicate the size of the in-game screen.
Title: Re: Help with shading a character
Post by: Decroded on September 03, 2013, 07:25:16 am
The most important advice I can give you is that this is too big of a size for pixelart. It would be too much work to make it look good!

You could instead create the graphics of your game in another medium, either digital-painting or vector-based (latter might be harder)

If you insist on doing it in pixelart, you should reduce the size (to around 64x64) and duplicate or triplicate the size of the in-game screen.
^ Yeah what he said.

Decided to have a crack at a simple robot since I never done it before...
(http://i1126.photobucket.com/albums/l615/Decrosion/shadeyrobotstrip_zps4aa03550.png)
(http://i1126.photobucket.com/albums/l615/Decrosion/shadey-robot-progress_zps7f571950.gif)

Here's the steps I follow (some stuff done a little out of order):

Sometimes it helps to add a secondary light source such as a red background light, or the common blue sky ambient reflection.
This can really help define your forms, though game sprites are often better with a single light source so they fit into a variety of backgrounds.
So I'd probably advise to think about that when you start designing backgrounds.