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Topics - pkmays
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Pixel Art / SkullgirlS fan sprites
« on: January 20, 2007, 08:41:16 am »
I was quite taken with the character designs from Alex Ahad's journal and his SkullgirlS website, so I made some sprites and played around with alternate color schemes.



These are the three done so far, in the order they were made.



Top one uses a ton of colors (around 4 shades per color), lots of AA, and took over 2 hours from start to finish. Not very efficient even for a practise piece. Bottom two are more streamlined and standardized with 3 shades per color and went much faster. They all break the 16 color norm for fighters, but meh, it IS a new millenium.



Saved the major steps for the second one. First step is line art (from this scan), next step is lay down colors, then add some shadows and finally smooth stuff out.



Some experimenting with the sprite. The lines looked too thick and I felt they where giving the impression of a scan that was just shrunk down and turned into a GIF instead of genuine pixel art. So I eliminated all the black and replaced it with the darkest shade, but the results felt too soft and I couldn't bear to lose so much definition.

I took a look at some Darkstalkers sprites and found Capcom seem to have encountered the same problem and relied on selout/inverse anti-aliasing/devil worshiping to deal with the problem. Mwahahaaa!!!!! Basically they found a way to keep most of the comic book style outlines but used some black magic to thin out the lines and keep them from getting to bulky.



Here's what I'm talking about. Still has a good deal of definition but the lines aren't so bulky and IMO looks much better. I tweaked several other areas as well, like the eyes, fingers and toes.



Hot off the heels of the second sprite, this was basically approached in two big steps. I first drew the outlines over the sketch and used the AA created by shrinking the sketch as a guide. Then I went in and selectively destroyed the outlines and there you go, same result. Worked out pretty well especially since I'm generally terrible at manual AA (which hurts my selout too)    :'(

Anyway, I want some thoughts on the style, if the choice in lines works, etc. I'd also like to see if someone could come up with a better solution than using broken black lines. There's a way to get that nice cartoony feel that stays true to the style without relying heavily on selout, but it seems to be beyond me...

Update 2007-01-03

Painwheel WIP


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