AuthorTopic: Red Tail Hawk  (Read 4205 times)

Offline xiphirx

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 29
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • herp
    • View Profile
    • For The Swarm

Red Tail Hawk

on: June 13, 2010, 12:28:45 am


It's final in my opinion. Comments welcome :)
I whip my hair back n forth

Offline Mathias

  • 0100
  • ***
  • Posts: 1797
  • Karma: +2/-0
  • Goodbye.
    • http://pixeljoint.com/p/9542.htm
    • View Profile

Re: Red Tail Hawk

Reply #1 on: June 13, 2010, 02:59:40 am
Beak is odd, the way it is white and just kinda blends into head. Got ref?

My biggest want is discernible feather texture, whether it's realistic to see feathers at that detail level is another thing. I don't really like photo-real pixel art. It makes no sense to me.




(BTW, you seem to be using some odd ASCII characters under your avatar, they only show up as blank rectangles for me, the default substitute I assume)

Offline xiphirx

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 29
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • herp
    • View Profile
    • For The Swarm

Re: Red Tail Hawk

Reply #2 on: June 13, 2010, 03:21:57 am
< reference

Its not exact.

About my personal text, its just black block
I whip my hair back n forth

Offline Sly

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 46
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile

Re: Red Tail Hawk

Reply #3 on: June 13, 2010, 11:06:32 pm
The feather texture is spot on but I agree with Mathias about the Photo realism thing.

Maybe a little tone down the texture a bit and a bit less noise dithering would perfect it.

Also the personal text is this:



No zombies here.

Offline xiphirx

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 29
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • herp
    • View Profile
    • For The Swarm

Re: Red Tail Hawk

Reply #4 on: June 14, 2010, 12:58:52 am
I actually like the photo realism in it. I know what you guys mean by pixel art not meaning to look realistic, but I prefer realism :)

I whip my hair back n forth

Offline Kcilc

  • 0010
  • *
  • Posts: 217
  • Karma: +2/-0
    • View Profile

Re: Red Tail Hawk

Reply #5 on: June 14, 2010, 02:19:17 am
Right now your silhouette is iconic up the wazzoo, which is why the realism looks funny here. Also, you shaded the feathers backwards. it looks like the edges are lighter and the middles are darker in the reference, like a turtle shell, which is the opposite of what you have in your drawing.

If you really wanna go with realism, I'd say make a copy of what you have now and black it out, then try to match the silhouette as closely to the reference as you can. After that, you can tackle the feathers. Tip: if you want the feathers to look really good, pay very very close attention to what direction the they are going in, and try to capture that before you go into detailing each one.

Offline Jad

  • 0100
  • ***
  • Posts: 1048
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile

Re: Red Tail Hawk

Reply #6 on: June 14, 2010, 08:54:08 am
Ya, I don't really have an issue with you wanting to create realistic pixel art, but you're not succeeding fully just yet. You should utilize less pixel noise and search more for believable clusters within your reference art. It will be some good learning, I think!
' _ '

Offline CrazyMLC

  • 0010
  • *
  • Posts: 282
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile

Re: Red Tail Hawk

Reply #7 on: June 14, 2010, 05:19:17 pm
It looks good... at first.
On close examination, it has some issues.

For one thing, the image and the reference do not look similar. Even if you didn't want to have a carbon copy, you left out some details that are unique to Red Tailed Hawks.

The shape of the beak is off, and it's missing the black spot at the end of the beak. (The tip of the beak curves back in your art, but in the photo it just goes down without curving back.)
The white spot behind the eye socket doesn't hug the eyeball like it doe sin the photo.
The feathers look really erratic. I blame it on the static. You should make it less spastic. Yo. (The feathers are just random placements of pixels. It looks good at first glance, but when you look at it for a second it looks wrong. Feathers can be generalized.)
The shape of the back of the head doesn't look like the bird. (It should have a sharper curve.)

Another issue, the feathers on top of the ears on birds is usually very thin and wiry so that they can hear through them. You can see this in the photo.
In your image the feathers look the same all across the head.

Something else, birds in general back black eyes. Their (usually) brown irises only show when light is reflecting off of them at the right angle, or in sunlight. This means that your eyes are a bit too bright.




I started here.
I went ahead and changed the beak and eyes to look more like the reference, even if you didn't want it to be exactly the same.

I wiped out all of the feathers, because to be honest, they made no sense.
I then laid out the basic sections of the feathers. Over the ears it's lighter, over the eyes it's a lot lighter, and everywhere else it's kind of the same.

I also (tried to) removed some banding that was spread out across the piece.


Remember: No matter how photo-realistic you want your image to be, you have to start somewhere.
Cartoony drawings are like outlines for research papers, it helps a lot to have one.


I touched up some parts of the image, and from there I just scribbled some lines to show some direction, and added in some more shading.



(Also, what was with that dithering outside of the border? :huh: )
Oh, it was AA for the transparency. Nevermind.

EDIT:
« Last Edit: April 09, 2013, 02:27:46 pm by CrazyMLC »

Offline xiphirx

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 29
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • herp
    • View Profile
    • For The Swarm

Re: Red Tail Hawk

Reply #8 on: June 14, 2010, 08:33:43 pm
Oh my. Thank you for that awesome edit. I'll try to learn as much as I can from it :D
I whip my hair back n forth