Mobile reply, so ill keep it short. I just had to reply as soon as possible cause this is already looking great. My (admittedly amateur) eyes see no real anatomy issues anywhere. Composition-wise, i think the only element that weakens it is the big circle. The guy isnt centered in it, but if you did center him in there, it would either shift the cirle off center or the comosition would feel too centered if you shifted the guy. I think its unessessary to the image.

As an alternative, if you want to have something to border the upper half of the image or something around the guy, the chain could be brought back from behind the guy on the left to replace the circle. It would make the chain a bigger element. Or, if you want to keep a graphic element for the background, you could do a silhouette behind him of a landscape element or relevant location (church, mausoleum, somewhere else that might have grave stones?).

Looks freakin awesome so far, tho. Cant wait to see where you go with it. Love the colors, too.

A different approach to the coloring style. I like the more graphic look to it, but the eye stalks are still problematic. Went a little bolder on the shading as well. Still not entirely sure which direction to move with it...

EDIT:

I'll try not to bump the threat every time I update

edit ->

Had another go at this shading. I kinda like it. I think I may keep the eyes white for now. I like the higher contrast. The outline is slightly more saturated and a wee bit lighter. It makes it not look so great on a pure black background, but anything with the black level above 15 (that's HSV -> Value level) keeps it looking good. Wasn't planning on using much pure black in anything in the backgrounds, but I guess I won't know for certain until I actually start making them...

Edit 2: Fixed his right shoulder a smidge. It was bothering me.

Been a hell of a long time since I used to post here, and even then it wasn't regularly or anything. Decided to get back into the swing of things and finally start working on some games and pixels and stuff. Some doodles:





Started cleaning this one up and decided he looked too human, so I doodled some more alien looking variants and goofed off. He's supposed to be a humanoid alien that's kinda dumpy and out of shape. A grumpy packrat sorta guy who wanders the backwoods of space looking for derelicts and wrecks to scavenge for scrap parts and salvage. Wanna make a mildly metroid-ish game with him cause I like the notion of having the player cast as a character who is not equipped to handle a game like that, so you'd be trying to just keep the guy alive, killing a few enemies and avoiding most of them instead of rampaging through caverns blasting things. This guy would not survive Zebes.

Boss fights would be about trying to escape, not trying to kill it.

EDIT: more exploring. Think the bottom left guy looks like a winner...

I did an edit:

yours -> mine



Step one was to reduce the colors. Yours had over 100 colors. Mine has eight. Seven for Pikachu and one background color. I'd suggest using a pixelling program like aesprite, graphics gale, proMotion or something similar. These have indexed color palettes which allow you to keep control over how many colors you're using.

After I reduced the colors I went in and redefined the lighting using the light source from the left and slightly above. Your image also seemed to have light coming from the bottom, so I got rid of that. Having really well-defined shadow shapes will make your images feel nice and solid.

From there I just went in and used the available colors to redraw the outlines and do a wee bit of AA here and there. With a few more colors you could smooth out all the little jaggies and such. I didn't want to redraw your entire shape or anything, so the outline is more or less the same, but I made some alterations to the ears and butt area and cleaned up a few issues with irregular outlines. I like 'em to be nice and smooth if at all possible.

The biggest change is probably the mouth shape, which I redrew to make him a little more happy, and I gave him some eyebrow ridges.

Lighting is probably the biggest factor in the edit, as well as contrast. Don't be afraid of your shadow shapes. I could have pushed the contrast more, in fact. Shadows define form, and if there's no contrast to the light and the shadows the image won't feel solid.

Keep pushin those pixels, man. Practice, practice and more practice.

Maybe from a purely academic point of view you could say it wasn't 'pure' pixelart, but if you consider the original to just be a base that was then heavily edited at the pixel level, I don't see why it wouldn't be considered acceptable.  On the other hand, if tracing is considered unacceptable, then using the actual image as a base might also be considered 'cheating'...  I dunno.  I guess it all boils down to how you feel about it.  Had you not shown the process and just posted the finished piece, would you be comfortable with that?  I mean, it's not like you traced a photo or something.  You drew something, then you applied pixelart techniques to that drawing.

It might not be 'pixelart', but it's definitely pixeled art...

It's also awesome, btw.