Those Mario pictures are awesome. Mario and Luigi are my favourite, followed by the piranha plant and the thwomp.


I decided to try doing some larger pixelwork, since it's not really something I've done before. The first one's an alien that popped into my head somewhere between playing the two best shooters ever, Metroid Prime and Half-Life 2. The second one's a nest of some sort I guess (I didn't really have anything in mind when I started). The third one was done at the request of my 9-year-old brother.

The metal tiles are perfectly square, as though they are being seen from a top-down perspective, while everything else is seen from a more slanted view. I think that you should begin by fixing this.

There is no consistency between the shading and outlines between the different parts of this image. This should be one of the first things that you fix because the more detail you put into something, the harder it is to change its basic style. I'm going to guess from the image and the comments that you have a habit of learning how do draw different things from different sources and then emulating their styles on those objects. Learning from example is good, but you have to put your own twist on it and form your own style to tie it all together. Don't just learn how to draw a particular object, learn why the artists have drawn them that way and try to apply these rules to other things.

The branches on the tree in the foreground look slippery, more like squid tentacles, due to the smoothness and the way that you've highlighted them.

I really like the flowers on the other tree, but while you've outlined the flowers themselves, the internal features such as the stamen are almost unreadable because they are not outlined.

I sort of like the gradients and think that they are appropriate in this case, but you should be prepared to receive a few negative comments on them since they don't fall within the boundaries of traditional pixel art. The same goes for anything with transparency, such as the beams of light under those glass platforms leading up to the edge.

Currently it reminds me of the characters from Alien Hominid, albiet with more shading.

The clothing looks leathery to me currently, but if you were aiming for a fabric look you should ditch the specultar highlights. Fabric has almost no specular highlight whatsoever.

Here's my take on it:

In my search for a good color palette, I decided to inspect the colors of the hair and skin in photographs of me an my wife. I was quite surprised by the results, so I'd like to her your ideas on this. (Perhaps, to clarify I should add that I am a very pale skinned European and my wife is Asian.) 

First of all, even though I know next to nothing about photography, I think that you could get a slightly better idea of the colour of something by just looking at the thing/person itself. Every extra step in the middle is one potential way of warping the results.

• The half tone of my skin is a desaturated and grayish hue of red orange (HSV around: 20 40 80) . When looking at the photograph, I would say my skin is pinkish or whiteish, but that shows that the camera reacts differently than the mind.
  

This follows what I said above. I'm a Canadian of German and Estonian decent, and looking at my hand right now, the colours of my skin gradient seem to go from a pale yellow, to pink, to brown, to grey. Naturally, any non-white light (such as the light radiating from my computer screen), or light reflected off of colour objects is probably messing with these results. In fact, white light even distorts things. Human skin is slightly translucent, which is why you can see blue veins through your skin and why thin parts of the anatomy (e.g.-fingers), may appear red around the edges when lit brightly from behind. Describing this using a more scientific approach, the phenomenon is called subsurface scattering. The photons travel into your fingers, bounce around a bit, and come back out. Along the way, the frequency of the wave (colour) is being altered by the materials that it bounces off of.

• In normal light circumstances, shadows on the skin have a more orange/yellowish hue (around 25). This is different form what I read  before.

The sun is a yellow star, and many lightbulbs give off a slightly yellowish glow. Thus, it follows that everything would be yellower under regular conditions than under pure white light. What you are observing is not the actual colour of your skin, but the colour which it usually appears to be. I would assume that they wouldn't be too different, but the natural light colours would probably be better for a sprite in a realistic world, while the actual colours would be better for characters in a varied and colourful world because they are more average. Just a guess. Anybody else know something about this?

• The human brain seems to use some kind of extreme "jpeg" style compressing when seeing, and the colors of reality into a kind of symbolic colors that are different from reality. I think the brain especially brightens colors. Also, it seems that contrasts are highly simplified in our brain.  Hue also seems to be somewhat unreliable, and tied to prejudices in the brain.

The brain has to process a lot of visual information very quickly, so it must compress all of that information somehow. I think that the brain uses colours to identify things, so it naturally picks a colour that seems rather unique to a certain material. I'm guessing that this is usually a more saturated average of all of the colours a substance reflects. As far as the brightening goes, the brain could just be imagining them in a brighter light. I don't really know. This whole paragraph is complete speculation on my part.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject. Hope most of it makes sense. I find it interesting that the colour someone sees is subjective anyway. Some people are colourblind, a rare few see things tetrachromatically, and everyone else still has a slight genetic variation in the number of rods and cones they possess.

first thing that came to mind was an abstract cigarette, but perhaps thats just my cravings...

Nope. That's what I saw too, and I've never smoked a day in my life.