The lineart is not bad, and not a bad palette either. The main thing is that the eyes are not aligned. Also, I'd personally advise against drawing in her spots at the lineart stage as it needs to be more properly defined with color. Since that one spot on her face is very prominent however, I can see how it would have been important to include. Up to you.

Once you started coloring, my main concern is the banding around her spots. If you are going to do anti-aliasing, don't have it completely border every contour--it's going to ultimately be visually unappealing. My edit was just me messing around and only really worked on the head, but definitely pursue more subtle anti-aliasing for the spots.



You're making progress for sure; keep it up.

As I told you before, *amazing* take on her, PixelPiledriver! You got her character down! You made the purple leggings/hose look pretty good, I was this close to adding them myself. Really the only thing stopping me is I already have a character wearing leggings and I don't want the designs to seem redundant. I love that lighter--makes me think of a firecracker. My favorite part in the process was the one with the smoke spelling "Yo". Thank you!

I have to head to work, like, right now, but wanted to post this before going. I'll add more details to this post when I have time.



EDIT: OK, have some time. Before I saw that edit, I was making it look like the one with the blue line indicating balance and center of mass... I was just going to post some progress when I saw it, and I thought, "I have to work on this some more", and after a few days of ruminating I came up with the above. The shadow was last minute, and I didn't redo the chain, so they don't mesh too well currently. I noticed that I had made her hair big to the point where combined with the hat, it added something like 3-4 inches to her height,  so I reduced the top some.

As it is going to have animations, all of the previous versions and all the edits will be factored in when I get to animating. I can't let that blunt and the smoke effect go unused.  

I don't consider this finished to 100% satisfaction, but with the exception of the fingerless gloves it is pretty much fully rendered and I want to work on something else. I have a whole lot of WIPs that I am going to post here when I am able.

Looking better. I see what you're getting at with the legs, but at the moment it looks like her legs are different sizes. Her left leg (the one with the stocking) looks shorter. Grimsane and Elrinth's edits are a good reference for how to even them out. By the way, is her right foot simply at an angle, or is it partially lifted, like she was standing on the side of that foot, kind of like this of this? It's hard to tell.

She looks much more like Monica right now. By the way, are you using a reference? The picture on the Dark Cloud Wiki isn't a bad choice. Also, this is a good in-game pic since her head is straight on. It looks like it may have been the pic PixelPiledriver used to reference. I'm guessing you want her to have similar proportion as the original character, so definitely keep using whatever you can find of her to guide you.

Good work on the hair, Alex.

Edit: Argh, yeah you said in the first post that you referenced Google Images. Oh well. XD

I can't say I don't dig the weird look.    For some reason it makes me think of something I would see in one of the Mother games.

Good effort. I shrank them to normal resolution, copied the ones you finished into individual files, and tested them out.

The outline on this one doesn't really work, even when I used a black background.

It's hard to tell what's going on at all with this one. The colors are too murky and it's hard to read the expression.

The crying one is very hard to read and could use more contrasting colors.

This one isn't bad, but the shading on the mouth was kind of random; I edited it slightly.

While I love the expression, I can't tell if it's supposed to angry or confused. Also, the outline doesn't translate very well on brighter color schemes.

I think these two are the best overall, but I'm not sure what the expression is for the green guy. Yellow smiley guy could use some more polish.


Overall, the biggest problem is the outline--due to the AA, it's going to be hard to find a color scheme that looks good with all of them. You could minimize the problem by outling them like the green guy--its outline works with most colors I tried out.

I'd do a real edit, but pressed for time at the moment. This is good practice though. I hope you keep working on them. Maybe try more standard smilies, too?