Black Feathers Crow Corvus

[Zettman]

I'm working on a plot for a side scrolling rpg / manga. The theme is animal tribes (Think Laguz from FE) with DBZ fighting scenes lol (Without so much the ki blasts, just strong blows)

Here he is
Some of the Palette isn't mine

at first I thought "Hey, he looks fine" and dumped it in the portfolio, but now people are telling me "the face looks weird" or "I can't see the body" :/ How can I fix him up, so that he'd look... Less hated.

Also working on a portrait for him... Palette isn't mine as I was testing around trying to make it look as good as some other referencial stuff, but failed.

I didn't want to post the portrait... But there it is. Just to give you an idea of what his older self looks like (I'll be doing a shippuuden styled timeskip lol) I'm kind of stuck on it, don't know how to approach large pixelated hair/clothing... 

P.s I wanted to do a portrait of him in his younger ages but could not :/ I'm bad at it in free hand, and in pixeling I can't even do it right proportionally T.T

-Inspired by Bakumans Manga -Crow-

[Krut]

Hey, im really liking the bird man;

More than the face, i think that what bothers me is the lack of contrast between the different parts/areas of the body; it's fine that you are re-using the colours there, but you need to use them in such a way to convey form, shadows and darker areas in a better way.

Also, i think this picture is a jaggie mess; it would greatly benefit from anti-alias, and reworking some of the lines.

Speaking of lines, i absolutely think that the lighter-than-the inside outline is not working; At least make it match the lightest colour in that area, and if you put darker lines on the darker places, you will convey shape better.

I'd also up the contrast on the skintone, and use lighter colours (pure white and grey) on the sword, since right now it looks like a tail.

Cheers, im diggin this. 

[Joel]

Serious contrast fixing and it should look really nice. The shades are so close together it looks blurry, it will really stand out more and become a focal point as a character if there's higher contrast between shades and darkened outlines, even if you don't want black outlines they really should be considerably darker than the rest of the character. Makes it more readable.

[Sardone]

edit time :U