AuthorTopic: [WIP] My First Sprite  (Read 6235 times)

Offline Shinobi

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[WIP] My First Sprite

on: March 05, 2011, 08:21:34 pm
Hello folks,  I started drawing a sprite today, but I'm a little bit insecure about the lineart and body proportions. I'd like to know what you guys think of it:

I'm using Photoshop and a Wacom tablet.



EDIT 3/6/2011



I redrawed his legs, corrected the lineart to be 1px thick, corrected his far arm and made the sword a bit longer. Made him bald for now, since I must get some references for drawing his hair properly.

EDIT 3/9/2011

Did everything again from scratch, this time only the character's body. I'll draw the rest after doing the basics in the right way.

So, I decided to do it with the tablet. It's good because I'm training both pixel-art and drawing skills with it.

First I made a rough...erm, rough:



Then based on in I did a slightly more polished rough:



Then, finally, using the tip given by st0ven, sharpened the lineart and cleaned it to let it with 1px thickness. His "eyelashes", brows and mouth are still like that because I don't know what to do to give the proper weight to them.



Really not sure about the drawing style, I'm still working on that. What do you guys think?

 
Thanks in advance for the attention.
« Last Edit: March 09, 2011, 05:49:55 pm by Shinobi »

Offline Âme

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Re: [WIP] My First Sprite

Reply #1 on: March 05, 2011, 08:43:27 pm
I like it so far but your line art should only be one pixel thick. like this


Also I think the sword should be abit longer and the lump by his right knee seems odd. His legs should probly be shorter and his torso longer by alittle bit. Also his head seems slightly too big. Mabey if you made his sholders a few pixels wider?

P.S. you dont have to add a zoomed image. Pixelation lets you click the image to zoom. :)

Offline Shinobi

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Re: [WIP] My First Sprite

Reply #2 on: March 05, 2011, 09:23:59 pm
Yeah, maybe his limbs are a little bit longer than needed  :P

About the line thickness I'm trying to correct that as much as I can, but i'm not used to see where is wrong or not.

Âme I couldn't see the image you posted, imageshack is blocking it or something like that.

Thanks for the help!

Offline Cure

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Re: [WIP] My First Sprite

Reply #3 on: March 05, 2011, 09:36:57 pm
image shows up fine for me.
the sword, as has been mentioned, seems too short. that's also a pretty blunt tip. the hands don't seem to be gripping the sword, just floating in the general vicinity of the handle. the far hand at least. have it firmly grip the hilt below the other hand. stance doesn't make a lot of sense to me. is he about to swing the sword? gripping it in preparation of an approaching enemy? or just posing with a sword? legs are too straight, no one really locks their legs out like that, let the knees bend a little.

Offline Demian

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Re: [WIP] My First Sprite

Reply #4 on: March 06, 2011, 03:37:40 pm
Âme I couldn't see the image you posted, imageshack is blocking it or something like that.

I had the same problem i think (The frog inside the icecube image). Register at imageshack and keep yourself logged in, then you will be able to see all images :)
^^

Offline Shinobi

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Re: [WIP] My First Sprite

Reply #5 on: March 06, 2011, 09:06:52 pm
Âme I couldn't see the image you posted, imageshack is blocking it or something like that.

I had the same problem i think (The frog inside the icecube image). Register at imageshack and keep yourself logged in, then you will be able to see all images :)

Thanks for the tip bro, problem solved :)

First post edited. I adjusted some things in the sprite.

Offline st0ven

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Re: [WIP] My First Sprite

Reply #6 on: March 06, 2011, 10:08:20 pm
So my first observation is that you have a lot of space youre working with here! sometimes drawing at these sizes with a solid pixel brush can actually be a detriment to the final product when youre going for large figure poses/anatomy, its almost like the small pixel brush can trick you into thinking you can fit less detail than you actually can.




I just painted in a comperable quick figure (not proportionately accurate, went with like a big head/shoulders, small leg thing, makes it look more charicaturey) in the same pixel block size you are using to scale and you can see that you can get some pretty stylish anatomical gestures going even at that size! if you have a paint brush vs a pixel/pencil brush, if youre going sprites at these sizes (particularly if you want to animate them) id suggest maybe doing some digital figure sketches to make for a nice base to use as a guide for when you go forward with pixeling. hell, even throw in some basic color/values! once you flatten it out and reduce your colors it should retain the basic structure youre hoping to illustrate. Some may call that cheating, but imo its more practical than not.


EDIT:



just did a few sharpen filters and then flattened the pixels and did a really rough lay in process as an example. this is a pretty good method if you wish to 'paint' your sprites... but if you really wanna go for the clean line art approach id recommend sharpening that up to its final state before layering your colors in (or behind) your lineart.
« Last Edit: March 07, 2011, 01:49:11 am by st0ven »

Offline Shinobi

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Re: [WIP] My First Sprite

Reply #7 on: March 07, 2011, 05:41:49 am
So my first observation is that you have a lot of space youre working with here! sometimes drawing at these sizes with a solid pixel brush can actually be a detriment to the final product when youre going for large figure poses/anatomy, its almost like the small pixel brush can trick you into thinking you can fit less detail than you actually can.




I just painted in a comperable quick figure (not proportionately accurate, went with like a big head/shoulders, small leg thing, makes it look more charicaturey) in the same pixel block size you are using to scale and you can see that you can get some pretty stylish anatomical gestures going even at that size! if you have a paint brush vs a pixel/pencil brush, if youre going sprites at these sizes (particularly if you want to animate them) id suggest maybe doing some digital figure sketches to make for a nice base to use as a guide for when you go forward with pixeling. hell, even throw in some basic color/values! once you flatten it out and reduce your colors it should retain the basic structure youre hoping to illustrate. Some may call that cheating, but imo its more practical than not.


EDIT:



just did a few sharpen filters and then flattened the pixels and did a really rough lay in process as an example. this is a pretty good method if you wish to 'paint' your sprites... but if you really wanna go for the clean line art approach id recommend sharpening that up to its final state before layering your colors in (or behind) your lineart.

st0ven, first of all, thank you very much for the attention and for the drawings. They'll help a lot.

I kind of made a sketch before doing the pixel lineart...using a pixel brush though... It's kind of messy, but here it is:



Indeed, I'm feeling lots of difficulty to draw small details the way I'm doing now, like the hands or subtle curves of the body. I don't know if there's a proper way to draw sprites, so I though I had to do everything, even the sketches using the pencil brush.

Before starting it, I was thinking about doing sketches in a larger size (Maybe with pencil and paper, since i'm not very familiar with using a tablet yet), then reducing it and then drawing the pixeled lineart. Or should I insist in doing it entirely digital, at the right size that I want the sprite to be?

Again, thanks for the help. Hope to present some improvement as soon as possible.

Offline Mush

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Re: [WIP] My First Sprite

Reply #8 on: March 07, 2011, 05:51:55 am
I would definitely suggest sketching it out on pencil and paper first. It can take a while for to get as comfortable with digital as traditional mediums. For anatomy, download some free Loomis books (specifically "Figure Drawing"), and get drawing  :)

http://alexhays.com/loomis/

Offline st0ven

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Re: [WIP] My First Sprite

Reply #9 on: March 07, 2011, 04:45:34 pm
the correct answer is - you should do what youre most comfortable doing. I feel pretty comfortable doodling in photoshop or something and its easy to correct mistakes and make adjustments, so its a bit quicker for me, but if youre a better pencil artist than at digital sketching, do that yeah. Ultimately youll have to scan it in, shrink it down and clean it up a bit to begin your pixel over process anyway. Another reason i like to do digital is because it makes it a bit easier for me to throw in base colors if i wanted to rough it all out in the sketching phase.

drawing large and shrinking down is usually a good thing. one point to be careful about though is that there is this tendency for pencil sketches once shrunk down to pixel size for their 'bulk' in muscle to look smaller than you might have thought, so you might have to make some tactical enhancements to proportion sizes either before the scale down or during the pixeling process.


good luck and looking forward to seeing more.