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Messages - StarRaven
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11
Pixel Art / Re: [C+C] Title Screen Conundrums
« on: September 08, 2015, 10:20:48 pm »
Don't fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy! Every moment you've spent working on this has been spent learning, so it's not time wasted even if you decide not to use what you have so far. Save it and maybe you can use something from it later, but don't hold on if letting go will get you a better end product. :)

12
Pixel Art / Re: [wip][c+c] Tiles for Game jam
« on: August 15, 2015, 10:16:42 pm »
Are the trees/bushes with the brighter leaves passable? Right now, they don't look like part of the background to me. (Overall, the tiles are looking beautiful, though!)

13
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] [C + C] Platformer Sprites
« on: August 12, 2015, 02:59:34 am »
First off, there's a mechanic in this forum to enlarge an image by clicking on it, so blowing it up is unnecessary. :D Second, that animation is really shaky! If the character is standing in one spot, their feet should stay in one place, not jump all over the place.

14
Pixel Art / Re: Back on here after a rather long haitus
« on: August 07, 2015, 12:12:19 am »
If you have trouble with it, try using a bigger brush for most stuff! Only use a single-pixel brush to move around specific pixels. Another suggestion is to only use a graphics tablet for big stuff and move to a mouse to go in and push single pixels. (I know I'm way less likely to scribble with a mouse.)

Another suggestion is to start a new piece and start with as few colors as possible, only adding one when you need to refine details. Especially when it's small, you can do a lot with just two colors for the fur, for example.

Also, remember you probably don't need too much texture on such small pieces! Just a hint of it here and there goes a long way.

Anyway, that's all ideas that helped em out. Good luck! :D

15
Pixel Art / Re: Back on here after a rather long haitus
« on: August 06, 2015, 07:15:26 pm »
@Lark These really look like sketches. You seem to know what you're doing in terms of drawing and digital art, but your handle on the basics of pixel art seem to be a little shaky! You should read up on some beginner tutorials like the ones here. It doesn't look like you're really micromanaging pixels right now, rather like you're just scribbling with the pen tool. Out of your art here, I think this guy looks the best:

(It looks great!)

@Atnas I can answer this so I hope you don't mind if I do! The pixel art community is a little different, since it's pretty small, but there is actually a really huge problem with art theft (specifically, people who repost art -- they save it and then upload it somewhere else later without sourcing it) in the digital art community right now! And actually yes, even professional artists do it. Unless the art is officially tied to something well-known or the artist is well-known and easily identifiable, most artists will at least put their name or website on it.

When your grandfather was actively making art, he probably wasn't so reliant on people seeing his art and coming to him to pay him. He probably just made the art and sold it. In the digital world, that's not how things work. Nowadays, art can be shared effortlessly and without cost, and we have to make that work for us as best we can.

16
Pixel Art / Re: Tile help
« on: March 28, 2015, 03:59:09 am »
I thought it was a forest with some really big trees in it at first -- that grass is huge compared to those houses and the tank. (It is nice grass, though.)

17
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] 4bit RPG Tiles and Sprites
« on: March 18, 2015, 05:44:49 am »
Thank you for the compliments! <3 I've been struggling with some other art so I haven't had time to spare for this but I'm still working on it.

@Luke:
The light source in the house is kind of faked -- the shadows are there to give the impression of depth and shadow, but accurately portraying shadows would require a much larger amount of tiles than I can reasonably work on! As it is, these shadows only require the wall as a transition point. It's a technique that's used in a lot of old 2d games, like here in Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete which was really formative to me as a lover of these kinds of graphics. (I guess it's my Seiken Densetsu, haha.) If you'd like though, you can imagine that these are giant dollhouses and we've taken off the roof to look inside. :lol: Some girls have dollhouses of wood or plastic, mine are made of pixels.

With a palette like the one I'm using, which is only 16 colors for the whole game, adjustment to colors has to be done very carefully. Pushing that purple-grey a little lighter will affect everything else in the game, as well. I've got to keep that balance between "what do I need for this one tile?" and "what will be useful throughout the game?" In order to keep the colors consistent, I either have to decide that I won't change the palette much at all, or I have to keep all my graphics in one document so I can quickly examine the affect of all changes on every tile! There's a lot of strategy involved in picking just the right colors. It's a lot of fun. I love it. It's amazing how you can make those colors stretch!  ^-^ At the same time, sometimes you've got to end up making compromises and I think at this point, that particular tile is as good as it's gonna get. (I did try the lightest green and blues as mortar colors, as well as some others, but the result wasn't generally what I was looking for. I also tried taking out pixels, but at this size and level of contrast, talking out pixels looked a little silly and was really noticeable.)

Don't feel bad! I've been following your thread since you started it quite a while ago and I remember thinking how nice that tile was. It looks almost photo-realistic. I know you struggle with contrast issues too -- if you ever feel like it, working with a seriously limited palette definitely stretches your art muscles!

Sorry for the little ramble here! Guess I'm just in a good mood today. <3

18
Pixel Art / Re: anatomy attempt #1 (c+c)
« on: March 13, 2015, 03:22:35 am »
Hi! One quick thing about the legs/balance: when a person puts their weight on one foot, that foot should fall directly below their center of gravity.  On most men, it's near the waist; for women, a little lower. This is why your guy looks unbalanced: notice on the reference how that leg comes inward to hold up the weight of his body, since the other leg is over there doing minimal work that slacker.

I scribbled this:


I've also noticed that the angle of the shoulders and the angle of the hips tend to kind of offset each other.

Also also it's okay not to start from the skeleton. I tend to really stretch everything out if I do that, so I kind of work from bubbles and boxes. Gotta find the method that works best for you!

19
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] 4bit RPG Tiles
« on: March 11, 2015, 02:33:58 am »
Thanks for the edit! I think the big bricks look like they might belong in... like a castle or something, you know? Not quite what I'm going for with this, but I'll keep it in mind for other stuff. I think adjusting the colors worked okay. This is the current WIP:

(Haha; I wanted to try a couple different colors of that rug. I forgot I left them all in there.) After comparing the size of the sprite, the 1/2-width furniture was way too skinny. I think I've reached about the right size. I think it's looking pretty solid now, so I'll work on a couple of sprites while I continue to refine the tiles. Here's the progress on that:


For the record, I did try some other colors on the walls to see how they'd look:


SPLAT.

The first frame can be used for a "low HP" sprite. Might be too close to side-view.

20
Pixel Art / Re: [WIP] 4bit RPG Tiles
« on: March 09, 2015, 12:31:54 pm »
How would you make the bricks fainter by using more tiles? They're definitely pretty strong, so I'd love to hear another way of doing them. Maybe I'll just do the brick corners and imply the shapes. I'll see what that looks like, and try some more colors.

The tiles are 16x16! So using whole 16x16 tiles for the tops of the furniture means I can share them between all the pieces. Still, they do look too big, don't they? Yeah, they look too big. I'm gonna change it.

The shadow direction is supposed to be coming from more like the front left, I guess? I dunno, it was just easier that way, but I guess it's a bit lazy. It only needs the one transition tile on the floor, though! I do like the way Rikfuzz did it, though! I don't know why I didn't think of that. Maybe I'll try that instead. :D

Thanks for the critique so far!

Progress:

I lightened the cool grey and darkened the warm one.
>>

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