No it should not be omitted, but it should not be put on a golden pedestal of untouchableness either. That would just be wrong. Let's not mystify things, please.

As far as restrictions goes I have written quite a bit about that in the non-exhaustive restrictions thread, which I am too lazy to search now, just search for "exhaustive" and you should find it.

I have it bookmarked

These are looking sweet!

Did a couple of edits:



- Simplified the ribcage to match the style
- General tweaks to how bright some single pixels were in the skeleton
- Altered the shading of the mushroom's cap (added a colour)
- Cleaned a few pixels up here and there

Where are these creatures set? Feels like they are all very point-source lit, implying dungeons, caves and other interiors. Are there any outdoor areas?

Also, welcome back. 

Hello Sigil, and welcome to Pixelation!

Always great to see such an eager attitude towards critique.

Looking through the NPA stuff you linked, I've noticed a couple of trends:

- Neglecting line dynamic; I touched on this very briefly in another thread recently, though I didn't mention line dynamic specifically. What you have in many of your figures is a symmetrical alignment of lines. How do I explain that... I will draw it...



When your lines mirror each other you bring the eye to near stand-still. This strips the sense of life from the figure. You want the eye to move through the figure using lines to indicate both direction of movement and tempo. It's quite a long winded discussion to go into, but for the moment I think just focusing on asymmetric alignment will greatly improve the figures.

- Overuse of speculars; You have a tendency to apply sharp speculars to most surfaces, when in many cases this is inappropriate to the material. This has the effect of making everything in the image appear to be made out of goo. You can find a very brief discussion on speculars in Arne's tutorial.

- Weakly defined shadow or unlit subjects; using very soft airbrushes to apply vague, low-contrast areas of shadow. Try drawing extremely definite areas of shadow and direct light on a subject. If you cannot do this, don't try to hide away behind vagueness. Do some studies/exercises to improve your understanding of form until you have a grip of it. This will add much, much stronger sense of form and space to your pieces. If you take a walk around and look at how things are lit, the vast majority of cases involve stark division of the subject into shadow and direct light, with a small area in between that blends to two based upon the smoothness of the surface(s) of the subject. Things are only vaguely lit when there is an absence of direct light. Essentially this places everything in shadow, with large ambient light washing over the form.

To reiterate, your lighting process in some of your work involves vague, soft shadow and midtone subjects with speculars placed on everything to compensate for the lack of areas of direct-light on the form.

- Non-harmonised colour; I've gone into this before (another link), so I'll save myself some effort! 

Umm.. I've actually been eating while typing this and I think I've lost my train of thought. I might have had more points to list, I might not have. I honestly can't remember... Oh well, I'll leave it for now maybe more will come to me. 

Also: Please refrain from double-posting. Just edit your most recent post and add the new content. 

What exactly is your process for developing animations? Do you keyframe the movement? Do you use any kind of simple skeleton? Or do you work step by step through the motion from one frame to the next?

What it appears to be is the latter, as this often leads to very reluctant movements in the animation, with only small parts of the sprite being modified. You need to keyframe the entire figure moving through the motion from strongest stance to strongest stance, focusing on the shifting of weight/support through the figure (and in this case also the sword).

You can keyframe with a simple silhouette (can help with volumes), a very rough block in (I find this better to do after one of the other two), or a skeleton (helps maintain proportion and mechanics of the figure in motion).

Try thinking of the motion in terms of the key structural points on the figure: the feet, pelvis, spine and head. How does the pelvis move over the space that the feet bound? Is the head above the pelvis or not? How does this affect the spine? Basically, "is the figure in balance, or not?" If they are not, they will need to come to a point of balance by the end of the animation.

But to iterate, do not do this process frame by frame, keyframe it from major stance to major stance, then tween each of those, then tween those, etc until you are happy with the level of smoothness you have.

If you want high contrast and a cute style you need a different approach.

What you have at the moment is a whoooole lot of subtle grainy texture through everything. As soon as you dial up the contrast on that you get TEXTURE OVERLOAD.

The main tool you want to use is simplification. You want to simplify shapes down and work in broad blocks of colour with accented bits of detail. This lets you use all kinds of bright, saturated colour at any level of contrast without introducing graininess.

Here's a quick example:



It might not be 100% the style you want, or fit with the setting of the tileset (looks more like a dungeon wall to me), but the point is the process. Working with very few colours, building it up in basic blocks of tone, only introducing colours a couple at a time and for very clear roles. At no point do you want to introduce any kind of graininess to it. After the final step in the gif you can add more colours for AA (also to remove the dither-lines), but I probably wouldn't be going much beyond that.

You also might not want to work from dark-to-light. That's just my habit, but working from midtones into dark and light is a good practice. I suppose you could work from light to dark (sort of like drawing with pencils I guess), but that seems more problematic to me.

Also the interior walls of the house would not cast shadows like that, since the sun would not actually shine inside the house (because there would be a roof).