[WIP] [C+C] Fai Sprite

[Linaru]

Hello all,
Quite some time ago I was working on a little gender neutral fennec fox character that I named Fai.
Recently for a bit of pixel practice, I decided to come back to Fai and rework her/him

I have decided to try and constrain my art to Megadrive colour palette limitations however after reworking Fai's colours the character spite somehow seems off..  almost flatter and less round.  though maybe that's just the head and face lacking shading.
For reference, here is the Megadrive's palette



     Old fai sprite.                                        New Megadrive pallette Fai sprite.



I really want to improve the sprite some more particular the head which I have had difficulty shading due to the hat and facial details. so any thoughts/opinions would be appreciated as I am having issues working out where the flaws are, perhaps I have been staring at the sprite too long.

[Linaru]

I did some reworks on the shading, and have separated the tail to draw a new one.


it still feels rather flat to me, in places...

[eishiya]

I think the "flat" feeling comes from the fact that everything is shaded separately, and none of the shadows really connect or flow into each other. This makes the character look made of a bunch of separate parts, rather than like a single whole body. For the most obvious example of this in your sprite, look at how the lights and shadows on the leg's (don't) connect to those on the torso.

The new tail is better, but has the same problem with disconnected lights. It's one object, the white-orange boundary is just a colour change, there's no dip or separation there that would break the highlight.

[Linaru]

I think I see what you mean with regards to there being a the lack of dip/separation when I started the white fur's shadow and dark fur's highlights were the same colour,  I was trying to mimic the look of a Fennecs's fur which often is quite a soft blend of shades.

I will have to have a play around.

[Linaru]

Okay, so in order try and get a clearer picture of the issues, I have temporarily removed fairs clothing,  and tried to rework the shading on her body, the neck and shoulders still feel a little off but I believe that is the lack of scarf.



Without the clothes, there were a few areas that the proportions seemed a little off, so I have attempted to rework them.

[eishiya]

I tried to implement what I said about the different parts feeling disconnected. Note the lack of gap in the highlight on the tail.

The shoulders were off because you had some nonsense lighting: the arm was lit from the left, while the rest of the body is lit from the right, and the shoulders were largely in shadow when they had no reason to be.
I've remedied this, I think. The shoulders flow smoothly into the arms. There are shadows on the upper arms, the highlight doesn't continue there - that's because they're orientated in a way that they wouldn't reflect the light directly. I also gave the shoulders a bit more volume, they were sloping unnaturally before. Real foxes don't really have shoulders like this, but an anthro fox would need shoulders to be able to move their arms in a human-like way.

I didn't really do anything with the hands because I couldn't tell what poses they were meant to be in. I'm sure there's a way to improve them, I just didn't want to spend time drawing the wrong pose xP

I tweaked the feet both to give them more volume (the upper legs overhang and cast a shadow on the lower legs), and to make the left leg (viewer's right) match the proportions of the other leg.

I also tried to adjust the clothing a bit. I have the jacket a bit more thickness, since it looked like it was bulky in the front, but paper-thin in the back. I got rid of the wild highlights on the back of the scarf, as they were distracting and there wouldn't be much light there anyway. I also tweaked the 2nd darkest purple in the scarf to make a better transition colour between the other two purples, it was a bit dark before.

[Linaru]

thanks very much for the response, your cleaned up version really helped me see where the issues were with my shading.
I have had another attempt at reworking the sprite, moved a few things around, I also took out one of the colours on my palette as I realised the fur had more layers of shading than the clothing and dropping a colour gives me some more wiggle room later in the project.

I still need to work on the clothes as I was mostly focused on the base here, I also redid the hands and I am hoping this makes their pose a little clearer now?
I am still a bit unsure on the tail, as I feel like it should be bigger to scale with the body? but simultaneously I feel like it will conflict with the large scarf when I get round to animating movement.



hope I am at least moving the right direction on improving the sprite now?


===================
Edit:

Found the energy to rework the clothes as well, and further altered the colour pallette

[Linaru]

So been a little while, I have been talking to a concept artist who is making me some reference sketches that I hope will help me get an idea how the character will look while moving.

in the mean time, i had a play around with animating Fai's tail idle pose, it ended up being more frames than I had wanted  but here it is:


I have not really had much practice with character animations yet.

[Linaru]

It has been a couple of weeks since I posted about this, I have reworked the colour a bit making the darker colours darker.
I have also spent some time working out how the character sprite will animate/ the kinds of poses and made myself a better reference sheet.
Now I have begun working on a standing rotation animation which I think is the best starting point as it will give me a visual aid of the sprite from different angles.