Samurai sprite

[Kanapka]

I'm working on a samurai sprite for Battle for Wesnoth mod. There was a topic about people drawing some Wesnoth sprites on Pixelation here, in case someone is interested. (There are some specifications about the shadow, the pink parts getting colored in team color and the sprite standing on 72x72 hex, but you don't really have to care about them if you don't want to)



It's refferenced after (or more inspired by) this

C&C will be appreciated.

Edit: The image seems jagged to me - in a way that the pixels are of different sizes and not really square. It may be something wrong with my browser, anyway, if I right-click and choose 'show image', the image is ok.

[SwapBrain]

The image seems jagged to me - in a way that the pixels are of different sizes and not really square. It may be something wrong with my browser, anyway, if I right-click and choose 'show image', the image is ok.

The issue you are describing is typically the result of using built-in browser zoom function. For instance, Firefox allows you to zoom in by using CTRL+scroll-wheel. When you do this you may zoom to a resolution that your monitor does not actually support, and so has to approximate. This will result in non-square pixel rendering. The fix is relatively simple, for example in Firefox using View>Zoom>Reset (CTRL+0) will reset the pixel display ratio to 1x1. The particulars of correcting your problem will best be discovered by consulting your browser's documentation.

This does not look pillow-shaded as such, but the volumes seem awfully pillow-y - they tend towards the barrel/cylinder/oval shape in their rendering. Also, it would be a good idea to try to mix your palettes more unless palette-swapping is important (it has been a while since i played BFW, so i forget whether this is a concern.) While some of your color use is inventive and well-done, it seems like you could achieve very similar or superior results  with a smaller but more carefully considered palette. To be more specific, metal=gray, skin=tan, wood=brown works well enough on a visual-symbolic level, but unless these fellas are doing their thing under a 5000K lamp, you may want to consider avoiding achieving your lighting effects straight tints and shades (mixing colors with blacks and whites)and moving towards using chromatic grays (mixing colors with their complements).

[Kanapka]

I've tried and I've failed.



I didn't change much, because I don't understand my mistakes. I changed the helmet and pauldrons (I think that's the name for the gold things on his shoulders), and did some small changes to the armor. I also cut a few colors from the palette, probably could cut more. The other image is an official halberdier sprite from the game for comparison - I picked part of the colors from official sprites (skin, gold, wood). It seems to me that the sprite uses quite saturated colors and I tried to imitate that in my sprite. I don't know if I'm right or if it matters for consistency reasons. (The halbardier sprite is licensed GPL, so I hope no copyright warning here)

About chromatic greys: I don't know how to create or use them. They are created by adding a complementary color, which is probably easy to do with paints, but in digital painting it seems that it would result in small changes in  hue and lowering both value and saturation, what is basically what I tried to do. For example let's take the gold ramp (copied from other sprites): Is it ok, or should the hue shift be bigger?

If someone could point me to a good understandable-by-a-noob color theory article that would explain it to me, I'd be very grateful. I've found many articles that explain contrast of opposite and similar colors, but the only in-depth one I found was on huevaluechroma.com and I understand some one fifth of it.

I'd also need some more specific advice on the shape problem - I can't fix it because it doesn't look wrong to me. (I've messed up the face, but never mind it for now)

Thanks to SwapBrain for the response and info on the browser problem.

Edited to add some stuff.