that the underlying art is pretty ugly and devoid of any real design work.

tsugumo's first rule of pixelation: don't be an ass

either Seefour doesn't have the resolve to make their art better, in which case I'm pretty sure they'll lose motivation and stop posting without your discouraging them. Or they do, and we're about to see someone get better at art and be able to help out.

Saying "it's pretty ugly and devoid of any real design work" is a bit too mean. I mean, ugly is fine. If you really think so no need to beat around the bush, though I avoid being blunt with people I don't know because I don't think it's cool to be abrasive - devoid of any real design work would be supposing that the person you're criticizing actually knows how to do design work and decided not to; in which case it's justified to say "hey you forgot to do the thing you shoul've done".

But if it's due to the person not actually knowing where to start and how to do design work, then it's up to you to either help them out in learning how to do it, or refrain from replying.

This forum isn't here for people to feel better about their art abilities by telling other people they're worse at it - this forum is here for everyone to constantly get better. I know I did. SIX YEARS AGO *hyperventilate*

So anyway, Seefour:

- not gonna say it's not allowed to put a big fuzzy soft light ball onto your pixel art. I'm not a purist these days, but to a trained eye it literally does look like a super flat pixel art piece with a big soft light on it - it's easy to separate the two.

what you want is the illusion of light falling on a physical doorway with a shape, not a flat-looking doorway with an ill fitting light shining on it. Basically:

your underlying pixel art has pretty solid transitions between pixel colors, high contrast pixels next to each other. And then there's the soft light that creates ultra smooth color transitions between pixels. It doesn't match up. Not yet!

- what is your idea about this piece. do you have any inspiration for it, any ambitions with what you want it to look like? Do you have a project you want to use it for or is it just a stand alone piece?

- if you want people to be able to edit this, please post it at 1x size without the light. on these boards you can zoom in on any picture just by clicking at it, so 1x is completely fine in all cases.

Dudes, be nicer. I mean it makes sense to remind people about the zoom feature and to post at 1x but if you're looking for critique and you get "EWWW UPSCALE" that's like. come on.

also if it's 2x and 4x just scale it to 50% or 25% and make an edit and junk! it's ezpz.

that said, these images are upscaled to irregular percentages and it's not easy to edit!

Pixelation's main mode of conveying criticism has always been just drawing on top of each other's art (edits) and so posting at original size in gif or png (or bmp if you're brave) is Best Practice! (don't save in jpg, it does weird compression artefact stuff to pixel art!!)

Without editability, here's some critique! ... Lots of colors going on, lots of noise. everything looks a bit sandy in a way!

esp. with the potions and whatnot I feel like it'd make sense to try and make the liquid look clear rather than adding noisy texture to it.

Speaking of that, I think your "health" text looks clean and nice. the spacing between L and T looks weird, but it has the cleanness i'm speaking of and really nice style.

For the dinner piece, there's no need to have so much pixel noise in the tablecloth. I suggest trying to just work with big clean color shapes instead of scattering single pixels everywhere.

You're quite good at pixel stuff! Hang around here and maybe try a bigger character next time and I'm sure you'll get really good! You've got lots of stuff to learn about saturation, value and contrast and if you just hang around I'm sure you'll soak up loads. Good luck!

rough sketch edit that doesn't follow the grid at all! but I have, in the past, made tile sets with blood sweat and tears, so I know this kind of idea definitely can translate into tiles and tile variations etc!

So I looked back at when you were choosing whether to go with dark centers or filled in tiles and I absolutely am of the opinion that dark center is the way to go. The one instance where I think the filled in tiles works is on thin platforms about 3 pixels thick.

So this is an idea about where you could go when you make variant tiles or variant tile clusters. My experience with working with tiles is that you'd think you'd get the most mileage out of 6 one-tile variants, but actually using variant tiles I've noticed that variations that span larger distances (like 3 tiles tall, an entire 4 tile corner, etc) that have a distinctly different structure than the regular tile set will do much much more to give a more organic feeling to the entire piece.

So I'll go through some of the edits from left to right!

- I think one of the best things to realize about a tileset like this that has a middle piece, edge and corner pieces like this, is that every side can look very different as long as they're bridged together. There is no actual reason that the upper edge and the lower edge should have a similar structure - they'll always be bridged somehow regardless.

So I showed this by making the bottom edges have a stalactite kind of feeling to them. It's kind of an unimaginative solution but it's just to demonstrate that the tileset might become richer if there's a larger variation within it.

- The 3x3 block isn't super sexy. The way it's composed of tiles that bridge toward black without having a full block of black within it makes it feel a bit like a sphincter - here's a perfect variant tile opportunity! having a tile that makes it look like a full shape instead of a butth- .. donut!

- The entire right side is ideas about variant tiles that, in parts that are thin, break up the dark middle and make it feel more physical. I think the large dark void looks good on big tile pieces, but on thinner pieces of ground I think it's a good idea to light up more of the rock to make it feel more solid and physical.

... lots of words, sorry. I hope this will be helpful for you. I had fun with it, anyway, so no matter.

Good luck.

All of the colors in your palette are fully saturated - nothing ever enters the area of greatness. A whole dimension of color is lost

GRAYNESS I mean. Except grayness sure can be greatness

her boobies are just following some kind of anti gravity, bouncing the opposite of the body - it makes no sense, it should be offset, not completely opposite