Rarely in my day to day work do I come across a need for anatomy so whenever it comes up I'm always surprised and frustrated at how bad I am at it. I will be using this as a starting point to sharpen my anatomy skills. Well more like widdle them into something that vaguely resembles a point for now. Anyways...any help anybody has to offer would be appreciated. This is a make or break piece for a current project in negotiations so making it look nice is pretty key.

Nevermind the colors or shading for now, I kept it simple rather than having to go back and redo complex things later.

Oh, and this is a female model here although she seems to look rather manly...:/

Now you're getting somewhere! I very much so enjoy the depth, I think that helped alot. Especially with the cracks in the rock. The dark solid lines you originally had gave it a pasted on sort of feel. As far as the shrubs go, it looks to me as if they aren't really taking into consideration the rest of the lightsource. (maybe) In addition, they lack the detail the rest of the piece has. I'm going to do a quick edit on the shrubs, maybe the rocks. I'm having a hard time conveying what I mean...so stay tuned.



Okay, I kind of got carried away with my edit...I always do though.

The shrub on the left, I completely redid, with more of a leafy texture rather than bunches of circles. Whether or not it came out that great is another thing. The main point with that is to show a better way to handle leaves. I probably deviated from the original idea a little too much, and got a little too carried away with the shape of the leaves that I forgot to address the lighting aspect. So....nevermind that area too much. Gather what you can from it.

The shrub on the right, turned out better than the left. I pushed it further into the background since it was just asking to be pushed back. I kept your general shape and tried defining the leaves a bit better. Hopefully this one makes up for the less than great left shrub.

As far as the rocks go, I noticed that there was a lot of unnecessary dithering going on. Your colors mesh together pretty well and your dithering seemed to me, to be a lack of understanding of where exactly light should go. I'm not exactly an expert, but I feel that all that dithering worked against the piece.

What I did was solidify the lighting a bit more. This was done by filling out some dithered areas with solid colors and utilizing your highlights a bit better. This is where I did the most random pixeling so I can't say exactly what went on but hopefully you can check it out and know.

** Edit **

Alright, the shrubs before were crap...really I felt they would offer little if any intuition. So, I redid them. Since I've gone into editing my edits, I'll refrain from doing any more edits on this piece. XD

As PKmays has said, this piece has gone very far since the beginning.

I like the new palette a lot better. Looking back and forth between the old and the new, I can see what the main problem with the old palette was. Apparently those deep oragnes, reds, and browns stole the picture. The new cliff colors bring the picture together a lot better. The old ones just seemed to be yelling "HEY LOOK AT ME!"

I still feel that there are some issues with depth on the cliff however. The cliff looks rather two-dimensional. I think this could be fixed with a few simple shadows around the edges and the bottom. Right now, the only piece on the cliff that shows off depth is the "chocolate bar" (sorry ).

As far as high saturation palettes go, I too enjoy them but am only getting back into them recently. When I first started pixeling, every piece I did was with the same high sat 256 color palette. Although, I had no clue how to utilize high sat colors. So, after quite a few years of working with ragnarok onlines extremely desaturated palette, and then my own extremely desaturated palette I felt it was high time to get back to basics. That, and it would seem that purple shadows and desaturation are going out of style. XD

Thanks Fil! You're on top of things. I kind of forgot about this thread because this project is one that I work on occassionally.

Yeah, my pixeljoint gallery is littered with commissions, which is sad, because sometimes it's nice to do your own thing. But alas, I opted to make freelancing my work of choice and am now working 40+ hours a week, every week, and have a hard time finding the time to sprite for fun.

In other news, I'm going to be dedicating 20 hours or so to this project so I should have some more fun stuff by the end of the week.

A compilation of mines, forest, and town/suburb, tiles.

Mountain tiles.

After reviewing a few topics here, I've come to the conclusion that asking for some harsh CnC would only do better for improving myself. Since iso is my week point I figured that'd be the best aspect for me to start improving on. Above are some small, incomplete as far as objects go, tilesets I've been commissioned to do. Feel free to say and do whatever you want about them.

The compilation of sets versus the mountain set might be harder to edit, at least as far as the palette goes, since some of the tiles share the same ramp and there's a boatload of colors. Although, I believe most of those colors come from the random objects I threw in there.

Which brings me to the final statement; the objects are all older works of mine that I threw in to give the tilesets a bit of life. I realized that it interferes with viewing the tiles so I omitted any objects in the mountain. Anyways, if you want to crit those too, go ahead.