Alien Street Shaman

[JayKnox]

This is an illustration for a player's handbook used in a tabletop RPG called Eratoh 4e. It depicts one of the playable species called a kulper. This kulper is a street shaman worshiper of the god, Fresh Corpse.

Looking for general crit. I'm the least sure about some of the color choices and how well the image reads in general, but any crit is welcomed.

[cels]

Very cool design and a very ambitious piece! My personal views, in random order:
- I wish the halo and glowing gun had more impact as light sources. The cyan light from the gun could reflect on his fingers and the halo looks very bright, so one would expect it to be the most important light source. It's easy to imagine that one removed the pistol and halo from this piece and it would hardly affect the lighting at all (judging by the skull and the gun hand, the only important light source seems to be behind him, on our left). I know this is some supernatural stuff, but I think it's odd to have a bright halo that casts very little light.
- You've done a good job of shading his head to indicate shape (and light source), but the jacket and t-shirt look quite flat and the same can be said about the cybernetic implants. I would definitely try to make the head tech look more 3D, and get rid of the bright linework. The shading on the t-shirt doesn't quite indicate the shadow from the head and the jacket, as I see it.
- Since the skin and t-shirt has very large clusters / patches of the same colour, I'd do it the same way on the jacket. Get rid of the noise. Find another way to indicate texture, if that's the intention.

All that being said, I've never really pixelled anything like this, so take my feedback with a grain of salt.

[SeinRuhe]

My main advice would be to improve a bit the anatomy/structure, for me, it seems that the hand holding the piece of meat is coming out of nowhere and the hand holding the gun is too far apart from the torso so it seems disconnected, as well as some minor things that can be improved on the shading department (Mainly the placement of speculars).

Hope this helps to improve this piece, the concept is amazing!

[fskn]

It looks like that, for what you're achieving, you're using way too many colors. About half of them, without being generous, are wasted, as they're only slightly different in both hue and value (mostly dark greys).
If I pick up Photoshop and try to save that as a PNG8 image, then try to reduce it from the current 144 colors to 80, I can't really spot any really noticeable differences. That could be further reduced to about 30 and there would still be very little change.

Part of the beauty, for me anyway, of working with pixel art is working within limits of both size and color. But by reducing your palette you would (most likely?) also unify the whole picture.

As for how the image reads... I can tell what it is, and what he's doing... But like SeinRuhe said above, your anatomy could be improved.
His left arm (the one holding the piece of meat) hardly looks like it's his own. His right arm isn't too bad, but it doesn't read as being bent at the elbow.
You could try and draw it as a larger piece starting from a very basic skeleton, then building it up with spheres and cylinders now that you have your main idea down, just to give it more structure and volume. Try not to intersect anything with anything else, but rather only compress the softer bits if needed.

cels also gave good advice on how the halo and the gun should help light the figure. As they don't impact the figure in any way, they look like an afterthought. As you decided to put them there after you shaded the rest of the piece.

Overall I think it has a lot of potential, and the character itself is pretty cool, so keep it up!

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EDIT:

Please excuse that quick, dirty, and not that pixelartsy job.



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Would be interesting to see bits of where the jacket ends too:



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EDIT2: Actually, I think his right arm is fine as it is. Mine made his shoulder become toooo wide.
(always remember to flip your artwork to check for problems in all sorts of things, including symmetry.)



I moved the shoulder to the right a bit (our right).

[JayKnox]

It looks like that, for what you're achieving, you're using way too many colors. About half of them, without being generous, are wasted, as they're only slightly different in both hue and value (mostly dark greys).
If I pick up Photoshop and try to save that as a PNG8 image, then try to reduce it from the current 144 colors to 80, I can't really spot any really noticeable differences. That could be further reduced to about 30 and there would still be very little change.

Part of the beauty, for me anyway, of working with pixel art is working within limits of both size and color. But by reducing your palette you would (most likely?) also unify the whole picture.

As for how the image reads... I can tell what it is, and what he's doing... But like SeinRuhe said above, your anatomy could be improved.
His left arm (the one holding the piece of meat) hardly looks like it's his own. His right arm isn't too bad, but it doesn't read as being bent at the elbow.
You could try and draw it as a larger piece starting from a very basic skeleton, then building it up with spheres and cylinders now that you have your main idea down, just to give it more structure and volume. Try not to intersect anything with anything else, but rather only compress the softer bits if needed.

cels also gave good advice on how the halo and the gun should help light the figure. As they don't impact the figure in any way, they look like an afterthought. As you decided to put them there after you shaded the rest of the piece.

Overall I think it has a lot of potential, and the character itself is pretty cool, so keep it up!

-----

EDIT:

Please excuse that quick, dirty, and not that pixelartsy job.



-----

Would be interesting to see bits of where the jacket ends too:



-----

EDIT2: Actually, I think his right arm is fine as it is. Mine made his shoulder become toooo wide.
(always remember to flip your artwork to check for problems in all sorts of things, including symmetry.)



I moved the shoulder to the right a bit (our right).

Beautiful edits! Yeah I think in the original my lack of knowledge when it comes to lighting really shows, and I definitely see the points you've made here. I especially see what you mean when it comes to the lighting across the fingers and the tweaking of the shoulder/arm positions. I think I probably got a little too constrained by my canvas especially with the arm on the right. The raised elbow edit you made looks infinitely better.

Thanks so much for the advice! I'll definitely be going back into this one with a mind towards the lighting and anatomy.

[JayKnox]

I started incorporating some of your edits, and made some more changes. I directly ripped the colors from your lighting and its not totally cleaned up yet but I took the meat-holding arm out a little further, cleaned up the lighting some, added in some torn sleeves and tweaked a few more things here and there. Still a lot of cleaning to do, but it's already looking a lot better than the original.