Hi Guys, It's finally friday praise the lord!

Fskn have a really good point when telling you to sketch first on pen and paper, it's really a great exercise.

If you can, always use a tablet, it's better than a mouse in a couple aspects: It does feel a little more natural and it helps to avoid tendinitis and carpian. Save the mouse for pixel level cleanup, nothing can beat the mouse in that step! (You don't need to freehand characters without reference, even better, never work without references)

We do have preconceived ideas about poses and anatomy that often play against us. If your poses often end up a bit stiff, you can exaggerate said poses a lot to avoid this, your brain will compensate and end up with something in the middle. (This works for me, in my case my bane are torsos, the 1st draw I do on a day ends up having a torso that's half the length of what it should be so I try to draw what my brain interprets as really long torsos that just end up looking normal)

Other technique that can be useful is to measure angles, this is really personal, I measure with my fingers on the screen lol. Better techniques are to measure with 2 pencils or two crochet needles or even drawing some angles in the reference.

Here's a little edit on the character drinking from the canteen (Not sure if this is the correct word), the trick to exaggerate this pose was to imagine something delicious on the canteen, please be aware that on this edit I drifted a bit from your style and in doing so I'm certain I massacred any historical accuracy of the outfit:



Seems like your workflow is to do a silhouette and then fill it in, in my opinion this is the best method to pixel something. Pay a bit more attention to said silhouette, If you can feel personality on it, the final render will be loose and dynamic!

I do dig something in the original a lot, it looks a lot like a hieroglyphic!

BTW gratz on that Comments & Fav award on PJ!

Well, next stop on this train and I need a critique on the backview now. To be honest this is kicking my ass in ways I wasn't aware a pixel art piece could.

So my idea is one last round of critiques and send it before I get even more obsessed with it.

I'm drained but I can't resist a good post.

As always I will lick your designs in an erotic manner for a bit, nothing to pay attention to

This guy suffers from what my fairy suffered, the arm thats holding the sword doesn't seem to be making any effort to hold it, also the pose of the hand is a little feminine for this mountain. So close the arm a little bit and make sure to show to the camera the plane of the hand where you put the cocaine in to snort lol. Or just watch the reference I included.

Other minor stuff could be to close the leg on our right a bit, increase the size of the part of the helmet that rest on his shoulders by a bit (Just the part on our right). Adjust a bit the shoulder pad on our left to better convey that it's going around the shoulder and try to compress the color banding that's happening on the armor.

Reflective materials are hard as ****, think of them as mirrors, the plane that mirrors more light from the lightsource to the viewer is where you have to put the speculars, the darkest part of this kind of material is near the center, followed by some reflection in the shadow part, pay special attention to his left leg since is the part only that I tried to render properly.



That's all!

Edit: Look at the following image, as long as you have at least a Form Light, Highlight (Specular), Form Shadow, Core Shadow and Reflected Light you will have a great sense of form on your reflective materials.

http://drawing.wiki/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/all-modeling-factors-1024x576.jpg

The guy in the video down below (Dorian Iten) explains it like a charm, he has a course where he goes a bit more in depth with this theme but I do not recommend to invest on it, is a little too shallow for the price. Mail me if you want me to explain you every modeling factor *wink**wink*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vapw6n6FyU

@Cels I'll try to reduce some noise, I'm working with this CTR filter in mind so it doesn't look as noisy as in a HD display but still, If somehow I can achieve a good looking outcome for both that's the ultimate win. https://mattiasgustavsson.itch.io/crtview

Oh well, if the axe strikes as something an orc or barbarian would wield it means it's spot on for my pun, fairies don't wield battle axes. On the collab characters will be on a map where they have the right to have some NPC text that pops when the player gets near, her line is a pun: "A battle axe!? I could swear the garrison commander rolled a dice when deciding weapons for each of us!"

Lastly, neat to see you started with NMA, if you happen to see an interesting course let me know (BTW, currently taking Complete Russian Academic Drawing Approach, Color Theory Bootcamp and Dynamic Gesture Drawing)

@Fskn Love the edit, I would really like to give the dress a semi-translucent effect but to be honest don't know how, palette is quite restricted although they allow adding some extra colors (5, currently 2/5), seems a good idea to use them for this. I think pastels are out of the table due the restricted palette:



(Just click on it a hundred times till it's visible xD)

I think I'm going to do a couple pixel adjustments here and there and that's all. Your dress design is spot on so I'm going to steal it! If you have a Twitter handle let me know so I can tag you crediting for the help!

EDIT: The smile is growing on me, don't know which one will make it to the final version

First of all sorry, seems like MuMu from my previous post may have to wait a bit more before seeing herself finished.

I want to enter the milestone collab of @Pixel_Dailies on Twitter, the idea is to toss a coin and roll a dice to get the attributes for your character. Here's the post explaining the collaboration a bit more in case anyone is interested https://twitter.com/Pixel_Dailies/status/1388463213923258374?s=20 *Cough Cels**Cough Fskn*

So far my character looks like this:



Basically everything is settled but I want to push this a bit further, the axe is what's giving me more trouble, I do want the axe to be oversized to better emphasize her size but the design and position is not written in stone. I would also like to make her dress a bit more fancy without being distracting.

Any ideas my fellow Pixelationerds?