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Messages - Pix3M
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241
Looks like a character who belongs in an adventure game. A tourist as old as middle age looking for something... That's what I am.feeling when I look at this. Is that what you intended?

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Pixel Art / Re: game in space
« on: March 29, 2013, 08:46:30 pm »
What's difficult about changing colors?  ??? Only thing that comes to mind is that some programs handle palette adjustment easier than others.

243
Do not mindlessly imitate SNES sprite art.  :'(

While you are interested in old technical limitations, there is a technical concern a modern pixel artist needs to be wary of that a SNES pixel artist does not need to worry about. Back then, we had blurry monitors. Today, we have sharp LCD monitors. SNES sprites were never designed to look good on sharp monitors in mind.

Where two colors border, a line is created. That Guile sprite was intended to be rendered with gradient shading and stuff, but on a blurry monitor, the pixels are blurred and you get a gradient. Now you have lines chopping up the sprite work and it is a pretty unsightly visual effect. Some SNES sprite art naturally looks worse than others since some styles try to be more highly rendered, but if you really want to look like an SNES game, this is an important part of art history you want to know about.

244
Pixel Art / Re: Help making a puddle
« on: March 26, 2013, 03:16:56 am »
Whelp... here goes nothing.



I think this should mostly work assuming cloudy weather. In this case the puddle should have a flat surface so no point in trying to shade it. I made it a solid color but added lines to show where the rock pieces are under the surface. I also gave more depth to some of the rocks to show that the submerged rocks are lower than the rocks not covered up by the puddle.

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Pixel Art / Re: new pixel artist
« on: March 26, 2013, 02:57:16 am »
The color count of that image is over 16 thousand  :ouch: Knowing how to save your work properly is probably the very first thing to know when you're doing pixel art. You do not want to save your work as a jpg; it does odd stuff to your pixels and creates pixel noise as well. Save it as a PNG.

Other than that, it is generally a bad habit to detail with little pixel dots. Consider the tree that you're referencing... It mostly focuses on areas of color, not so much with trying to texture with pixel dots.

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Pixel Art / Re: Alien Characters Pixel Art
« on: March 21, 2013, 11:48:11 pm »
It's mainly being familiar with the tools of your trade, and being familiar with what you're drawing, and not distracting yourself too much. An alien which there's already a sprite made of (I mostly transformed it) isn't much trouble. I wouldn't worry about comparing speed yet.

Life drawings do seem boring but mostly when I have no actual drive to learn anything. At this point, I'm getting to a point where I'm starting to appreciate all the little details when stop and observe from life  ;D

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Pixel Art / Re: Alien Characters Pixel Art
« on: March 21, 2013, 09:44:28 pm »
Phew, wow... That was a pretty amazing post  :lol:

I'm honored that you took the time to redo the sprite, and it looks amazing! May I ask how long it took you to make? Also, do you use a tablet? I've attempted switching over to my tablet for pixel art but it doesn't feel very comfortable to use, I'm just not really used to the feeling of it.

I'll definitely try to work more with shading. I haven't really learned a hard and fast rule to it and this was one of my earlier attempts to use shading; still didn't quite get the look I was hoping for though, so yeah, I think the method you showed here would definitely benefit me to start messing with. I'll look up "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" too, sounds like a good read for me!

Thanks again for all your help, I really appreciate it. My biggest thing right now I guess is that I'm afraid to take risks with my art; I've been making most everything flat because delving into that frontward/behind depth of the character starts to just confuse me. Gotta really start working on that if I want to improve. I'll maybe try to redo this guy from scratch a couple of times and post what I get. Hopefully it'll at least be somewhere halfway between my original sprite and your edit!

I use a mouse for pixel art. Pixel-level precision doesn't really need a tablet, though I hear that a tablet speeds up the beginning stages when you're 'sketching' around. Still sprites of this sort of style and size (provided it doesn't have clothes and stuff) takes me roughly 30 minutes.

If you want to know how shading works, they say that doing still lifes can really help understand how shading works. Get a really dark room possibly at night, get a small lamp so you get only one light source, and experiment to see how lighting works and stuff under extreme lighting you get to have. See how shadows are made where light doesn't hit, and highlights bouncing off from surfaces directly to your eye like a mirror. Highlights are funny as whether an object has highlights depends on the surface quality and what it's made of.

Don't look at me as some art master though. There's plenty about shading that I don't yet know, mostly knowing how to convey objects being made of a specific material.  :blind:

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Pixel Art / Re: Alien Characters Pixel Art
« on: March 21, 2013, 05:04:14 pm »


Improving perspective... Well now that's mentioned, the sprite looks awfully flat. I changed the perspective to be facing more to the side.

I added shading with much stronger shadows to try to give it more depth, via using value contrasts. I think it's interesting you changed the hue and not the value to shade... changing the hue is important and it kind of works in this case since some hues appear at different values, but we can push our value contrasts much farther. IMO dark shadows are also a must-have if you want to make dark outlines work with shading. I've seen plenty of art with weaker shadows that made dark outlines look out of place :(

You can also 'overlap' things and place things in front or behind things to give an illusion of depth. Kinda what I did with the tentacles, which I even applied a wee bit on the bottom tentacles.

EDIT: I also changed the colors (and the presentation) to have a red-cyan color scheme. They contrast each other very nicely.

Plenty of things that can be polished up on my own sprite edit. I'm feeling clueless with highlights but thankfully you mostly want shadows to convey form anyways. The far upper tentacle ends up looking flat since I'm being too cautious about my rendering craftsmanship  :crazy:

But most of this comes from getting your brain to switch to '3-D mode' and not just seeing your flat canvas as a 2D plane. There's this nifty book I know out there called 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain' which talks about the psychological stuff behind what makes some people naturally 'good' at drawing while some people struggle a lot, but once you understand that difference drawing becomes much easier. If you haven't heard of that book before, I think it's a fun read anyways.

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Pixel Art / Re: Alien Characters Pixel Art
« on: March 21, 2013, 03:33:07 am »
Does it seem strange that the alien is walking sideways?

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Pixel Art / Re: 2D farm game - Feedback welcome!
« on: March 17, 2013, 06:44:23 am »
I think there's a number of characters in a tiled world of 16x16 tiles, and the characters are 16 pixels wide and 32 pixels tall. You could go for something similar, though drawing a sprite like 64 pixels tall might be a bit daunting for somebody who doesn't draw with pixels too often.

I think it's funny that the night time effect increases the contrast of your tiles. Might make things more difficult to read when background detailing is cluttering up your screen.

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