My first serious trainings

[DevilBlackDeath]

So hi everyone !

I'm new here. Don't know if I should create a presentation topic (didn't see one, and saw no mention of it in the rules  ). So I'll present myself here a little bit.

I started pixel arting about 5 years ago but very sporadically. I've wanted to be a game creator since I'm 10 and I'm now trying to make this dream true. Now game design and computer science, I master these pretty well (been doing game design literally since I'm 10, writing down game and stories ideas everywhere just to keep my brain trained and I have a degree in computer science). So I decided it is time for me to train my pixel art skills seriously.

I don't want to do a very clunky or too sketchy (won't be naming names "McPixel" *hmm hmm* but at least it's on purpose for this one  ) game. I believe the mainstream public have a bad enough opinion about pixel art because of this.

So I came here on the advice of DYA Games' artist and started browsing, and I saw a lot of constructive feedback, motivated artists, everything I was looking for. So here I am, taking the step to register and post my first creations.

These are my first 4 serious trainings. They've all been done for PixelDailies.

Worms with a hockey helmet and stick. I did actually use miror and recoloring for the reflection, but thought it was no big deal since if it was for an actual game or final composition, I could just extract the reflection palette to make all other reflections (so that's not exactly blurring, transparency or other "non-pixel-art" tools) :


A viking boat, initially started as a GB palette. I ended up using the 4 colors limitation, but not the actual GB palette :


Spyro in his classic promotional posture :


A demon genie girl being summoned :


I'll take advice about really anything since I'm pretty much a noob. Be it shape, composition... But I mostly seek advices about color. I don't master color theory at all yet, and I know my color ramps ain't that great. If you feel like editing my sprites to illustrate your thoughts, please do 

Well thanks in advance to everyone and I'm looking forward for your answers !

[DracoDragon42]

Hi, welcome to the forums.

I want to first say that experience is key. Just try to do pixel art as much as you can, or have a time of day that you leave open to do art/pixel art. In my case started about a year and a half ago and I have been doing pixel art almost constantly since then. What can help the most is to learn the fundamentals of pixel art from tutorials and such (that"s what I did) and then really delve into pixel art. Also try critiquing other peoples works on these forums, it helps too. Color choice is something you can learn, but it's hard to get the hang of. But as a sort of general rule, with darker shading you usually want to change you hue more to blue (cooler) and with lighting you want to usually go more to red or yellow (warmer). I'm not very good at explaining things, so i might do some edits later to help you.

[DevilBlackDeath]

Thanks for welcoming me  Well thanks for the advices    About tutorials I actually read a lot frequently but if you have any particularly excpetional tutorial in mind please do tell, I may have not read it and it might help me ! Critiquing I do it naturally but not on a forum or publicly so I guess I should start, having some insights on my critiques may indeed be a way to learn. And thanks for your shading advice too ! My problem is I'm afraid to go overboard. Whenever I choose a too blueish or yellowish tone I feel like it's wrong. But despite that it's what I admire in most vibrant pixel arts, the hue shifting and color ramps. They're just amazing.

Recently I've tried to study DYA games' artist work with his PixelDailies (which led to him advicing me to go here) because there are some amazing tones. I recently tried the pixelfor.me color ramp creator with Spyro, but I wasn't happy with the result and scrapped the recolor entirely !

Edit : Oh snap, just realized the site I use reupload my images as jpgs... Gonna reupload them. Anyone has a good pic hosting site that retain the png format and keep the pics private (at least url-private), because as far as I know imgur is not private or protected

Edit 2 : There we go, reuploaded to imgur as png  Sorry for unknowingly not following the rule 

[DracoDragon42]

so i did an edit but this happened:

please help, dont know why or how this is happening

edit:
figured it out, I had the alpha channel on and that happened, it looks kind of cool though...

[DevilBlackDeath]

WOW ! Wut is that? Did the upload bug or whatever? Or was my uplaod wrong? 

[DevilBlackDeath]

So I did a small re-edit of your edit. I wanted to add back the slender look (it was important in the base design, yours looked great, I just absolutely wanted that slender look ). Re-did the smoke mostly to train (still have a hard time to grasp how to do smoke, if anyone with experience in that field could do an edit of exclusively the smoke, please be my guest, I would love that ). Finally I recolored the shirt to try some coloring technique with black shirt.
Once again seeking feedback with this re-edit, thanks in advance guys ^^ And thanks for your edit DracoDragon, it helped me a lot

[Friend]

while you have improved the body of the genie, (nice job), I think you lost something from your original- a sense of action and dynamism.  Excitement!  Artistry!  A sense of being alive!  This was portrayed better through subtle cues such as the tornado esque smoke of your original, and the embers of the flames rising upwards.  I tried to reintroduce that sense of dynamism.  Don't be afraid to go bold, basically.  There are no limits.  This is an extremely rough and sketchy edit, but i hope it gets the point across.



btw you're 10 years old?? wow, keep up the hard work!  Do you have any knowledge of pixel based theory and techniques such as anti-aliasing and banding?

[Gil]

btw you're 10 years old?? wow, keep up the hard work!  Do you have any knowledge of pixel based theory and techniques such as anti-aliasing and banding?

He says he started game stuff when he was 10 and he has been pixeling for 5 years, so he's at least 15, maybe older

[DevilBlackDeath]

while you have improved the body of the genie, (nice job), I think you lost something from your original- a sense of action and dynamism.  Excitement!  Artistry!  A sense of being alive!  This was portrayed better through subtle cues such as the tornado esque smoke of your original, and the embers of the flames rising upwards.  I tried to reintroduce that sense of dynamism.  Don't be afraid to go bold, basically.  There are no limits.  This is an extremely rough and sketchy edit, but i hope it gets the point across.



btw you're 10 years old?? wow, keep up the hard work!  Do you have any knowledge of pixel based theory and techniques such as anti-aliasing and banding?

Woops, sorry, wrong tense, indeed, like said Gil, I was 10 when I started game design As for anti-aliasing I've read about it but I'm not always a fan of anti-aliased pixel arts  However I know I need some work with banding ! Btw thanks for adding back a couple of things I indeed think was lot in the process of re-editing And the purple smoke looks amazing  In the end it gets all your points across I think, don' worry.

Oh and to clear things up, I'm 23. And I started learning art and pixel art theories about 3 years ago and started more serious and intensive training some months ago. I'm working on a doomguy that I'll post later (I'm doing the doomguy cause I think it's an interesting choice for its colors and shapes). Should I post it in a new thread or keep this in a single thread for the moment?