(Revised) Cute girl sprite, Maple - Critiques and/or edits welcome!

[jackal27]

[EDIT] I accidentally uploaded the original sprite at 2x size. So sorry about that. It's fixed now.

It is very difficult for me to post this because I am such a perfectionist and this sprite is so so far from completion. There is next to no shading, I hate the color paletter, and it needs a lot of edits overall. I've pretty new to pixel art, but I'm learning. I think color is my main problem right now. Also, deciding whether or not to use outlines.

Anyway, this is Maple, the love interest of my game Driftwood. I've been working on her sprite for a while now and I think I'm finally satisfied with this basic idea. However, I'm having a very difficult time finding a color palette for my game and thus, a color palette for this sprite. I like the over theme of purple, teal, and white, but this is just way too pastel and I'm not sure what to do.

So yeah, I love some help, suggestions, edits, insults, death threats etc. anything you can give me. If this goes well, maybe I won't be so afraid to share some of my other stuff I'm having trouble with as well, haha.

[Tourist]

I think this is a nice start.

Minor crit:  I don't think the length of her sleeve should match the length of her top (coat?  blouse?).  The strong horizontal line disconnects gloves/mittens from the arm.

This image appears to be at 2x.  Is this the final size of the sprite or should it be half this number of pixels (for edits)? 

Tourist

[jackal27]

No, that's at 100%.

Her coat is more of a sweater poncho. Google it and you'll see what I mean.

[Tourist]

Ah, sweater poncho.  That's cool.

I don't really get the 2x2 blocks and the chibi proportions on such a large figure.  I guess it's a style thing, but it seems like you could do a lot more with the pixel space.

I fiddled with the colors a bit. 



The light purple only touches skin, so I shifted it towards red to be more continuous with the skin colors.  The dark purple touches only blue, so I shifted it a bit more blue.  Reduced the saturation of the blues.  Increased the saturation of the skin to make the face stand out, and this meant changing the hair color.  The hair color isn't working, but the rest is ok.

Tourist

[jackal27]

Thanks! I like those skin tones. She still needs a lot more detail than what she has now though... I've thought about adding an outline as well, but I don't know how that would really look or how to make it work. I guess I could just go for a Shiren the Wanderer style of outline. You can tell those were drawn on after the sprite was already completed.

[Tourist]

You've got 35-38 pixel head.  That's a lot of space, which means you have a lot of options.  I posted this in someone else's thread.  They were doing a 48 pixel portrait so these are a bit bigger that what you've got now, but hopefully it gives you some ideas.



The first is a model from http://www.female-anatomy-for-artist.com/.  You could study some references and make something that is realistic, or at least a cartoon-like.
 
The second is cropped from The Martyr of the Solway by John Everett Millais, painted in 1871.  Image from http://www.artrenewal.org.  I find classical oil paintings to be a good source for studying skin tones.

The last is from a dollz site, http://pixel.monicang.com/dolls.php.  Not pixel art, but dollz do have nice hair and eyes for heads in the 20-40 pixel range.

These styles are not compatible with each other, but you've got some options beyond generic chibi.

Tourist

[Kasumi]

A small critique, but it looks as though she's wearing only one boot that both of her legs are going into.

[jackal27]

Oh my word. I'm an idiot. The sprite was just displaying strangely on my browser. That's definitely 2x as big as she's supposed to be.

 I'm not really going for generic chibio, or chibi at all really. I simply drew like I draw and tried to get her sprite to match up with my main character's proportions as much as possible. She's a girl, so I gave her smaller feet and hands, as well as bigger hips, but I'll post both so you can compare (his color palette isn't set in stone either). The reason I went with a style of bigger heads is because I wanted to be able to animate facial expressions. These are also just the proportions for these two characters, other people, adults, children, robots, etc, will have exaggerated proportions in other ways depending on the character. Some will be tall and thing, some will large and muscular.


Obee


Maple

As you can see, Obee looks much better with an outline as well, so I'm thinking of giving Maple an outline... Hmmm...

Once again, so sorry about that mixup, hahaha. I'm going to edit my original post.

[jackal27]

A small critique, but it looks as though she's wearing only one boot that both of her legs are going into.

Once all the shading is finished and she's animated, that won't be an issue.

[Tourist]

I think this character does need an outline to be consistent with the other one.  I think you're going to have to bump up the color count on this character as well.

Tourist