Hey, I used to use JASC Paint Shop Pro/Animation Shop too and they were pretty great for pixel art back... 15 years ago, was it? Asprite is great, but let me also put in a vote for Cosmigo Pro Motion, it's been my tool of the trade for a long time, if you like Deluxe Paint and understand that workflow, it'll feel natural. If not, it has a bit of a learning curve.

Hi, Unkonoir! Thanks for posting your artwork.

First of all I want to say that I like your use of color, there's some ambitious ideas in terms of color swatches that you're blending together, it makes the eye follow the shapes well. However I think what would be helpful at this point is to go back a little bit to construction and think about 'the joy of pixels' a bit less and how to best represent volumes and light and texture a bit more. What I mean by this is that I feel you've started with relatively simple pixel sketches and then you colored them in and had lots of fun (fun is good, it shows in your final artwork!) with colors and some dithering an detail work on the dragon horns for example, the hair strands and so on. But before you got to that, it would have served you much better to have spent a bit more time with the sketch itself. For the dragon for example, really nailing down that worm-like body as a series of volumes with foreshortening and so on would have helped you a lot to make it more clear to the viewer. Never be afraid of looking at references from real life. Google a few snakes or serpents for ideas you can take and simplify and apply to your artwork. At this point you're going from imagination, and there's limits to how you'll learn like this. Please don't be discouraged by this advice, I can see you've already got some talent going and you are having fun with your pixels, but a bit more construction will really boost your work at this point.

The second piece I like more, probably because you stuck to your reference a bit more? Still I am not 100% as to how the face works. I love the pixel clusters on the legs, the tunic and the cape, though, you've got some good instincts about how to make your pixels work together there, but I think the helmet could use a little bit of a disambiguation. Would you like to share the reference so I can see what you were going for, there?

Hi, KaiserPixel!

I like your characters. They're readable and they've got personalities, and the use of color is solid. If theres anything I would recommend at this point with these sprites is to, as counter-intuitive as that sounds, remove most of the internal bits of anti-aliasing you've placed pixel by pixel and just let the shapes breathe as they are a bit more. You're working at a high enough resolution (but not too high, well done) where you do not need antialiasing to convey the shapes you've got going. I know it's not to everyone's taste, but it might be a good learning thing to remove a lot of these single pixel shinies and other *implications of curves* and just let your diagonals and solid chunks of pixels portray the shapes. If this all sounds a bit abstract as a piece of critique, let me know and I'll do a modest edit if you'd like.

There are underlying anatomical issues, but then again anatomy is an endless pursuit. I like that you are gutsy and are attempting animations to give them more character, and the spell glow is interesting as a choice, but perhaps if you want to convey that kind of motion with the arm going to the side as the spell burns, you might need to keyframe a little bit more and not rely on just shifting just that one arm around while the rest of the body stands completely rigid. As always with animation, the best piece of advice is to act it out! Stand up, play the part in your bedroom, become this cool hooded wizard and pose 1, place yourself before the spell does its fancy arc, and pose 2, place yourself at the end of that motion. These are two keyframes, and the inbetweens will become MUCH easier to deal with when you've got those two solid places to start and finish from.

As to the hair of the warrior lady when she takes off her helmet, honestly I like the volume and colors, I think you're doing pretty good! If anything I'd simplify the antialiasing again, heh. But on the whole these are quite promising. Keep learning

eishiya, thanks.

I don't think forums are bad for the critique process, in a certain way they're quite perfect, but I have a few reservations that mean it might be worth going the full step to a modernized setup.

1. As you say, the hurdle of registration on a new board is a HUGE way to keep people off of it. In the past we would have said in a less enlightened way "if they don't want to take 5 minutes to register, then how serious are they about learning?" and leave it there. However this is a new time on the internet and you log into everything with twitter etc. Also back in the day, forums were de rigeur for stuff like art critique. But today is today and we should lower the price of admission to as little as possible.

2. I want threads to lead with art. This is a board about art, and if you could look at what everyone's posted without having to click through a text header first, it's going to facilitate people helping other people with their artwork in an intuitive way. If I can scroll through a bunch of images, ideas might immediately spark in my brain about how to help them. Then I can click through and write under the art. We couldn't easily do this back in the day, but it seems that's the direction Mastodon for example would help with.

3. I just took a stroll through active pixel art threads and I was surprised and happy to find that nearly every one of them has at least one post with worthwhile critique by our pixel warriors. This gives me hope that the spirit of the thing is intact, we just need to help shape a better outlet for it.

Also, eishiya, in that exact stroll through the forums I noticed your good work helping others as well. Thank you.