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Messages - Silenia
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1
Pixel Art / Re: [Feedback] Human anatomy + Wood texture
« on: January 16, 2018, 04:49:21 am »
Pretty good improvements. Quick pet peeve though most people get wrong is that boobs go down, not to the side.

Good luck!

That actually depends a lot on the person. Different boobs, different shapes. Mine most definitely extend sideways past the torso. Usually means the person has a combination of wide breast-roots (=breasts are widest, or near-widest, at the part ("root") where they connect with the body), wide/distant-set breasts (=significant gap between the breasts) and often but not always bottom-heavy rather than top-heavy breasts.

And @Zanorin: Great improvements so far. :)

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Pixel Art / Re: [WIP][CC] Adventurer
« on: July 04, 2017, 09:04:22 pm »
Proportions/anatomy of that wolf are way off.

*Tail is far too short. (Should reach or almost reach the fibula)
*Back pair of legs has a far wider upper leg than the frontal pair. BOTH pairs of leg shouldn't be widening this early (the whole toes to first curve in the leg is the foot. The lower leg isn't much wider than that; it's only the upper leg--and even then only really this more for the back legs--that's more ham-shaped)
*Back legs show significantly more of their  "curve" than front legs in a standing position like this.
*Distance between front and back pair of legs is ~2-3 times the widest part of the back upper leg.
*Back legs should "merge" with the body at significantly higher height than front legs. This is because the torso "tapers off" towards the back, seeing as there are no ribs there.
*Neck starts at approximately the same width as the frontal legs and extends significantly forward from the torso. No part of the head is 'on' the torso but rather in front of it.
*The height of the head at its highest, ears excluded, is only about 2/3rds that of the height of the torso.

3
Pixel Art / Re: Idk junk and anime
« on: June 26, 2017, 06:46:09 am »
Nice start. Couple of issues, though:

*Something about Bluehair's sideview looks a bit "off", anatomically speaking. I'm having issues pinpointing the exact issue, though I think it's about the shape suggested by the hair's shape-'n'-shading on the one hand and the chin's angle on the other hand not matching up.

*I'm guessing that the different eye-sizes of Brownhair is intentional, since you've got it in both the small front-view and the sideview. However, in small-front, the right eye (viewer's left) is larger; in the side-view, the left eye (viewer's right; from hereon please presume that left=character's left, right=character's right) is larger.

*Purplehair's left lower arm is a bit malformed and it's hard to tell whether it's intentional. The left hand definitely is malformed and awkwardly so even if intentional. (The right hand's fingers also are a little, but going by the style you're displaying I'm guessing intentional there and you're hitting the a 'bit creepy' rather than 'o.O fingers don't work like that' effect there.)
The draped cloth is positioned in such a way that there is nothing actually keeping the upper portion in place. Even presuming some sort of wind effect on the part stretching past the character, it is hovering in front of instead of draped over the character's right shoulder.

*Bluehair seems to have had an eye-transplant between the two poses.

*The fur rims on Hornedhead's right (viewer's left) and left (viewer's right) arms don't match up with each other (even taking into account that the fur would be compressed/folded by the arm's bending, the left arm still suggests the fur rim is about twice to thrice as large on the outer arm as it is on the inner arm; right arm suggests 'same size all around); furthermore, presuming both are located just below the elbow (as suggested by the better-visible anatomy of the left arm), Hornedhead's right arm should have slightly more of the upper arm visible through the black ragged cloth. While I get what you're aiming at with the stomach muscles, they're a bit off anatomically. The eye seems slightly overly angled even taking into account the head's angle.

(A lot of this is at least partially stylistic stuff, as you seem to be going for some cross between the usual 'anime' style and a more 'horror'-based style, and there's some stuff I've opted not to point out because it almost certainly is deliberate stylistic choice. I've mostly chosen to point out a. inconsistencies and b. possibly-mistakes, possibly-choices-that-don't-quite-work at least imho.)

4
Aye, anatomy could use some work.

On the more pixel-art technical side of things, some of the colours you use are so close together that even at 8x zoom they're hard to tell apart. (I'm thinking in particular of the pink used below the outline of the (viewer's) left arm vs. the blue of the background; as well as the two blues used in the shadow. There's a few other cases, too, though those two were the worst I spotted) You've also got some jaggies especially on the hips.

5
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] Big cave
« on: June 16, 2017, 07:14:07 pm »
A good start. :)

*The grass and road/path/sand lack details, especially compared to the cave, and the colour--especially that of the path--is a bit oversaturated. The path narrows a bit too much towards the cave compared to how wide it starts, at least for the rather short distance suggested by other factors. The path also ends "higher" than the grass, while of course grass is taller than a sand path (and is likely to, at least near the edges, partially grow/hang over the path.

This near to a cave/mountain formation, paths are quite probably dirt paths, pebbles/gravel/rocks or simply downtrodden trails in the grass, not fine sand.

*The deepest part of the cave is too light, especially because the lack of detailing you give it suggests 'so deep into the cave little to no light reaches it'. The transition between 'enough light to perceive significant details' and 'nothing but darkness' is a bit sudden for such a large cave mouth, too.

*Rocks usually aren't perfectly grey, but tend to have at least some hints of colour in (parts of) them.

*The contrast between the sky and the third-lightest grey (the one used on the lightest parts of the 'main' rock formation) is somewhat lacking.

6
Pixel Art / Re: Oddly shaped ship shading help.
« on: June 09, 2017, 02:15:28 am »
Hope you don't mind another novella-sized reply. I tend to ramble on a bit and my tendency to provide (written) examples with everything doesn't really help there. Just give me a (digital) slap if you want me to tone it down a little.

Indeed. I tend to have this problem a lot.
(I make music! But it's not that good...)
It shouldn't be too bad to continue with this project though. After getting back into pixel art and actually knowing what I'm doing, it's become much more enjoyable and I actually have the motivation to finish it!
(Thanks to all of you, of course! ;) )

It's a pretty common problem when it comes to creative stuff--whether art or music or writing (or whatever other creative pursuit)--that tends to get acerbated when in a digital environment because computers make it so easy to put incomplete stuff away with the thought of 'will get back to it later' and because things remain malleable to a great degree. Whereas with some of the non-digital creative pursuits you're far more  bound to physical limitations both regarding the 'how' and the 'when'. (e.g. you can't really decide in the middle of mixing paints to get the right shade that 'oh well, this isn't what I want but I'm gonna use it and replace all of these drab browns with a more vivid shade later' and if you keep hopping from stone sculpture project to stone sculpture project, eventually you're going to run out of room to put those darn half-finished rocks in)

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Yes! Definitely! I will continue to tweak it before i begin shading the main body of the ship + adding in the small details. (I don't want it to be just blue, of course! It'll look boring that way, unless it has really good shading, which I don't think I'll be good enough at till I get enough practise. But Anyways.)
Aye, practice helps a lot. Tweaking is good, but you'll eventually notice that just because colours look good as a ramp doesn't necessarily mean they'll also work as intended in an actual piece of art. Don't get discouraged if you find you have to tweak your ramps a little again when you get to shading and detailing.

Nearby colours influence the perception of other colours a lot, so what looks one way on an organized monochromatic light-to-dark ramp may give off a different look when surrounded also by colours from your other colour ramps, or when surrounded by colours with a wildly different saturation.

For example, if you put a red with low saturation (so tending a lot towards grey) among a bunch of pure greys, it'll appear pink/red-like by contrast. (Indeed, if you've got a low-saturation piece of art, putting any highly-saturated shades among them will generally look very, very jarring. Like "eek, my eyes are burning if I stare at that shade too long!" jarring, sometimes) Put that exact same low-saturation red among a lot of highly-saturated colours (red or otherwise) and it'll look very, very grey. 

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Ah yes! I changed the hue just to make it as light as I could while still keeping it, um, looking "blue", if you get what i mean. I have a question about this though; Should I consistently change the hue as I decrease saturation, or chunks?

Edit:

I ended up doing just that, and I kinda like how it came out!

Think you may be mixing up 'hue' and 'value' and 'saturation' here. Value is how light or dark a colour is. High value means close to white, low value means close to black. Hue is which shade it has (so, blue, or purple-ish blue or magenta or cyan or yellow--etc.) and saturation is how close or far it is from being grey. No saturation=greyscale; high saturation=bright colour.

As to changing hue alongside value and/or saturation: sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on what you're drawing, what kind of shading, what sort of light, etc. In this case, it works, at least in part because all your blues are really just depicting one blue--the jet/engine--that appears different due to light and shadows. Perhaps not the clearest way to explain it. Think of it this way: if the airship was a real, physical object, it'd have the same blue paint used across its body. Which parts look lighter and darker isn't something innate to said body, but dependent on if, how strong and where light hits it. It's not that someone painted the left side with a lighter paint than the right side, or that it got some sort of damage or staining resulting in one side being darker. It's the same material all across. It's just not the same light all across.

Sometimes, however, you use a colour ramp to depict multiple different "blues" (or greens, or yellows or whatever). Say, rather than a space-ship alone, you're depicting a full scene...and maybe other than the metallic-paintcoat of the jet's body, there's also the woollen sweater with three shades of blue stripes an off-duty crewbie is wearing. And oh my, look, someone used some blue spray paint to leave some off-colour ditties on the walls of the spacedock, claiming the only reason the capt'n has such a large ship is to compensate for something .

In that case, you may well still have a single colour-ramp of your blue-shades, but while some are probably used for more than one, maybe even every blue, you may also have shades that are used for only one or two blues, and when arranging purely on a light-to-dark order, saturation and hue may flit back and forth a bit more because of the different ways light and shadows interacts with different materials. (Dark blue wool won't brightly reflect light the way metallic paint does, for one) Or maybe not and you just have a simple, short ramp of blue shades all of which are reused across every blue. It all depends on the exact piece of art.

There's also artistic concerns that may influence things: maybe you're experimenting with a wildly different style. Or for whichever reason, you've taken up a challenge to create a full scene in just 8 colours and you really can't spare more than three on the blues and that's if one doubles for "black" as well. You're making something within the limitations of some of the old consoles. You plan to fully animate the image, making keeping the colour-count down a real good idea. You're going for a "washed out picture" effect. You're going for a bright cartoony feel. You're doing something surrealistic.

So, to summarize: it can work (and in this case does, mostly*), but there really isn't a "one way works for every piece of art". It depends on many considerations, both on an artistic level and regarding the material and lighting you're depicting.

*mostly: your darkest two shades of blue in your newest ramp could do with either some increased contrast, merging or removal of one, though as you don't seem to currently even use the darkest shade, I'd lean towards merging/removal myself.

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Pixel Art / Re: Oddly shaped ship shading help.
« on: June 08, 2017, 07:08:18 pm »
Yeah, nothing wrong with trying out different styles, but probably best to first finish up what you're currently doing and then do another one in a different style if you're still interested in trying then--you learn more that way than by halfway abandoning attempts to switch to another style (and quite possibly then another, and another, etc.) because, beyond the basics, a lot of learning how to get the effect you want shading things hinges on that later-stage tweaking you'd otherwise miss out on.

Plus it's remarkably easy to get into the bad habit of abandoning (or postpone to work on "later" which becomes indefinite postponing real easy) pixel art attempts when they become difficult, but rather hard to get out of said habit. Even more so when you don't have much if any completed stuff to fall back on to convince yourself that yes, you're capable not just of starting stuff but also of finishing it.

Blues are certainly better. Not perfect, perhaps, and I'd personally throw in a little hue-shifting* and playing with saturation*, but I can tell the different shades apart when looking at the colour-ramp at 1x without having to stare too much. That's pretty great improvement. Or, to properly visualize how much improvement it is:



On the left side, from top to bottom, the blues you've used in each successive image. The ones in the grey-bordered box on the right are the blues I used in my edit, for comparison purposes etc. I'm sure you'll agree with me that your current blue ramp looks a lot better than that original monstrosity of a blue ramp, yes?

*hue-shifting and playing with saturation: Just because they're all blues doesn't mean they have to all be identically-blue blues. You can for example have the lighter end of the blue ramp tend a little more towards cyan and the darker end more towards purple, as I did in my blue-ramp.
Other than your lightest blue, all your blues have the same saturation (85, if you were wondering; the light blue has 67 saturation). Since they're also all in the exact same part of the blue range ("hue"; 221 in your case), the sole difference between them is light/darkness ("value"). For one, this is not particularly realistic, but more than that it makes building proper contrast and providing visual interest a bit more difficult.

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Pixel Art / Re: Oddly shaped ship shading help.
« on: June 08, 2017, 04:13:33 am »
You're making nice progress. :)

Keep working a little on cutting those down, but 21 certainly is a lot closer to a "sane" number of colours for an image like this than 64. ;D

Yeah, I could tell you hadn't done your blues yet, as they are still rather numerous. Not necessarily bad if they'd all serve distinct purposes, but the fact that one has to zoom to properly tell apart the different shades means you can fairly safely cut at least one or two of those out. Especially the darker half of the blue ramp is really, *really* close together. If nothing else, consider at least merging 1d53c6 and 1e55cc. (2nd & 3rd darkest blue respectively) At 2x or even 4x zoom one has to pay a lot of attention to tell those two apart--meaning the difference is effectively invisible at 1x. Probably worth it to darken your darkest blue a bit or merge it in with those two, for that matter.

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Pixel Art / Re: Oddly shaped ship shading help.
« on: June 07, 2017, 07:50:54 pm »
Made a quick (didn't have much time, sadly, and didn't want you to have to wait a few days) edit of your old art (so basically, a response to your response to me rather than your more recent posts) and didn't have much time to look at your in-progress rework yet, though from a quick glance, yeah, your blues don't have quite enough contrast yet.

(My edit is, due to being a quick one, nowhere near perfect and could use some tweaking. In particular the greys could use further tweaking. While the blues and aquas are now at perfectly manageable levels (4 and 3 of them respectively), there's still six greys used and even with the further detailing/shading I've done, that could probably be reduced to five perfectly well. The darkest blue and second-darkest grey are also a bit closer in appearance than I'd prefer. There's also still some banding on the wing edges and the wings in general could use a bit more work--I was in a bit of a hurry near the end)

Tried to stay as close to the shape you had as possible.



The main problem you have with making 'round' (or rather, cylindrical) things seem round is that you're dealing with a slightly misaligned perspective. It looks like you want to portray it as 'mostly above* and slightly behind/level*', but you ended up portraying some parts as almost straight above (part of the body and such), while other parts are shown from a near-level/behind* perspective (the engine openings especially). (*what would be above/behind/level if it was a jet or plane on the runway, at least. Space or airspace and directions can be a bit iffy, yeah?)

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Pixel Art / Re: [C+C] Character Designs
« on: June 07, 2017, 01:56:46 am »
Looks great, but I'd make the bubblegum on the last one slightly more, well, bubblegum pink. (A little more towards red and some increased saturation)

I had to zoom in slightly (2x) to tell that yup, that was bubblegum and not a facial deformation, due to a lack of contrast between bubblegum and skin colours (both being pretty low-saturated light shades in the red-ish color area).

Quick example of what I mean:

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