I played around with the colors and tried doing someting to the shading similar to st0ven, but I'm not sure anything actually improved (except the shading on the shirt, which is now more to my liking )...

thewexxl0rz, what exactly do you mean with "fuzzy edges everywhere"? Do you mean, in the hair? Do you mean the actual edge of the sprite (between hair and background)? Do you mean the anti-alias? I'm not sure what you want to know... If you mean the edges of the hair, I want to give the impression of curly hair and this seemed a good way. I don't see anything wrong really...
(haven't really paid much attention to the hair since previous iteration though).

st0ven, nice edit! No worries, it's absolutely not useless, because it's different which means I can learn from this. I like the dimmed colors idea, but it looks like you removed the ambient light by strengthening the contrast. It's not what I want for the final image, but it's great as a learning tool, so thanks! Is there any specific reason for the "reddish" and "greenish" hues of two of the colors in the skin ramp? Are they to imply a second light source? I'm asking because I'm not an artist...

About your tips, I'm willing to start over using a more proper methodology, after all I'm here to learn and not to produce sprites quickly. So I might just do that, just to compare.

That's an interesting edit Facet! Thanks! Interesting in the sense that I need to see closely what you did with the hair and see if I understand why.

I like what you did with the darker colors by the way. It makes me think...why did I have so many dark colors? No matter what the result of that thought will be; it's always good if people make me think


There's another interesting thing going on with your edit. Because, to be honest, my first thoughts when I saw it were "this is pretty nice....but it looks like it's someone else" (even when I put my hair on your face). Which is interesting as you said you made some changes for likeness's sake. That gets me wondering....why do I find it less recognizable? That's not a question for you to answer, just something I'm wondering myself.

Anyhow, I'll experiment more with the hair. Thanks

Thanks for the edit Terley!


Anyhow, what I did was first remove all dither, per the tip by DTfM, but you get noticable color banding and I don't like that. Also skin is not so smooth. Then I looked at Terley's picture to see what (s)he did and tried doing similarly. I noticed you're using checkered dither, where I used random dither. The reason I did that was to try to have a smooth transition of color, where with checkered dither one can only have 50% between colors. However after seeing the effect of your edit I think my random dither also creates more of a mess.
However I still clearly see the color transitions (forehead mainly), and I'm still not sure I like them...

(By the way I like what you did to

• the lighting at the left, so I changed that
• the lips (coloring) so I darkened the color there. Not sure why you removed a color though
• the tiny "anti-alias" between jaw and background. I did a little change there but I might want to recolor the background so I used an aliased way)

I do have to say though that looking at your edit I feel like "copying" even though I do not "literally" copy. But that might just be me.

Anyhow. Any advice is welcome! (right image in this post is latest)

Hi all,

As you can see I am new to this forum. I am actually more of a game designer than a pixel artist, but when I needed portraits for a game idea two years ago, I noticed I quite enjoyed "just" drawing portraits with no particular purpose, and later on I started doing existing people to see if I liked that too.

I have drawn several portraits since and I have certainly improved (I find my first drawings very bad, and that's a good sign). However I haven't seen improvement lately, and I thought, well, that's the moment to ask others for their opinions, suggestions, etc. So I'd like to hear anything you notice you think could be improved, be it lighting, anatomy, coloring, proportions, expression, method, etc. etc. on the pixel piece below:

This is the distribution of colors:
Color counts
Here's how I did it:
Progress image

Reference
Here's the two pictures I used for reference (yes, I am mixing pictures. I'm trying to depict a specific person, not recreate a specific picture ):
Reference image for face
I used this picture for the face, because it had good lighting, has a full frontal view and shows the right emotion.
Reference image for hair
I used this picture for the hair because I liked it better.
I used a third picture for the shirt, but I couldn't find it anymore.

So...what do you think?



EDIT 9 March: please refer to reply #17 for an up-to-date sprite and accompanying reference picture.