Pixelation
Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: TMcSquared on October 05, 2018, 03:14:32 pm
-
Hey guys, this is my first attempt at good pixel art, I would love some feedback and tips as to how I can improve my skills.
I am more of a programmer by nature, but I do have artistic tendencies. I'm currently making a 2D game and this is some of the first art concepts that I've made.
(https://i.imgur.com/5jddtHD.png)
Please give any tips, improvements, or critiques that you might have, thanks!
-
That is starting simple, that's pretty good. The last thing you want to do as a newbie to a skill is overstep yourself and your skill, a simple tileset is a good metric IMO. Rez might be an issue tho if you can't cut it down to 16^2 tiles for the sake of practice.
EDIT:
Riffing on the first 32x32 tile
(https://i.postimg.cc/rF73jczc/tileedit.png)
Pretty complex stuff here, I can't wrap that up into 1 coherent post targeting 1 piece. All I can say is start with the basics, shading, color etc., what goes way beyond pixel tech. Check out the pixelart/various lists under Tools, Resources and Linkage (https://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=23281.0) here. Way more...but that's it right now.
It's a long road ahead, but enjoy it man.
-
UPDATE: I've been working on my tileset base image!
I'd love tips to make it a little bit better.
(https://i.postimg.cc/Wzgm0XqN/Testing.png)
-
don't add highlights to everything, it's giving it an unpleasant greasy texture. Dirt isn't that shiny!
-
Please don't use the "width" parameter when posting images, just use plain [img]. The fixed width prevents zooming, which makes it harder to look at your image and give you more detailed feedback. The "img width" feature is meant for clickable banners and such, not for sharing art for critique.
MysteryMeat is right, avoid having highlights everywhere. Use them to draw the viewer's attention to important things, such as the parts of the environment that the player can interact with directly (e.g. the tops of platforms).
The edges of your tiles are perfectly smooth, which makes all your hard work on the textures in the interiors of the tiles feel a bit wasted. The edges should be as textured as the interior, since they're the same material.
The edge tiles are distinct from the interior tiles, which means they're an opportunity to create variation and a more natural look. By copy+pasting substantial portions of different tiles, you're squandering that opportunity and making things look more copy+pasted than they need to. That's fine for tilesets that have cartoony textures or that are meant to depict repeating textures, but you seem to be going for something more natural-looking, something that should have its repetition minimised.
-
Thanks, MysteryMeat and eishiya, I've improved this a little bit.
(https://imgur.com/7b6MFtl.png)
The dirt still looks slightly greasy and kind of flat, but I'm not in a rush to fix that, right now it works enough for me to lay out a basic level for my game. Any tips on how to make the dirt more realistic(aside from toning it down on the highlights) would be greatly appreciated :)
EDIT: sorry I linked the upscaled version D:
-
Think about what kind of dirt it is. Is it rocks? If it's rocks, then the rocks could have well-defined, sharp, flat faces to help them look more rocky. Is it soil? Then it probably won't be made of clumps or have highlights, though it might have some rocks within it. Decide what you actually want it to be, it's harder to make something nondescript/vague to look nice xP Plus, if it's something specific, you can look at reference of the real thing.
The dirt looks very flat on the front because all the clumps have the full highlight-midtone-shadow range. Try making some parts recede by making them only midtone and shadow, and make some bits pure shadow to make them look even deeper. You could make the highlights on some bits larger to make them look like they come forward more. But, before you do that, first decide what the dirt actually is, as you may want to change its entire structure.
-
To give the dirt a more defined and less noisy texure I would try to avoid single-pixels as much as possible. Single pixels are good for conveying specific details at a low resolution (think one-pixel wide eyes on a creature for instance), but they read as noise in other situations. Try to regroup your light-dirt and grass pixels into bigger clusters of the same color, it gives more defined global shapes and is easier on the eye imho.