AuthorTopic: [WIP]Novice, working on smileys for another board C+C welcome  (Read 6804 times)

Offline Dessa

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Re: [WIP]Novice, working on smileys for another board C+C welcome

Reply #10 on: March 29, 2011, 05:05:38 am
Well, I should confess I'm working with a pirated copy of it, and I can only find Pro Motion in 4.7.  Suffice it to say I'm too broke at the moment for the real deal, or I'd buy a legit copy.  It either works differently or doesn't seem to be available in this version.

Offline trough

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Re: [WIP]Novice, working on smileys for another board C+C welcome

Reply #11 on: March 29, 2011, 04:05:52 pm
Have you tried using Grafx2? It's free, cross-platform, and easy to use. The only downside I can think of is the lack of animation support.

Offline Dessa

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Re: [WIP]Novice, working on smileys for another board C+C welcome

Reply #12 on: April 01, 2011, 12:42:51 am
This being my first project and all, work has been haphazard, and if I'm learning anything, it's how to plan a project better next time around. 

I've tweaked a few of them and trashed a few of them, but I'm starting to feel like one image will become a template for the others:


 
1st > Current

Does anyone else ever feel like "I just did all that work, and all I managed to fix was four or five millimeters?"  I feel like that.  But them's pixels, I suppose.

I added colors, like Tourist suggested, to make lines cleaner and to help distinguish adjacent elements from one another.  I increased contrast between the face and face outline, and between the face base and the hair base (and the background), and I tweaked her hairline.  I'm leaving her yellow because she is a smiley, and some things are sacred in this world.

I also did that little half-pixel trick on the bottom of the face, and while I'm not settled on it being necessary in this particular image, it's working for some others (they need more love before I'll post them here though).  Also, that's a really neat trick.

I stole a technique I saw in Pokémon to suggest depth by making the "furthest" outline pixels lighter than the "nearest" ones.

And although it wasn't suggested by anyone, I restyled the hair so it didn't look like a Donald Trump Shredded Wheat biscuit.  This matches the hairlines of the references a bit more closely (the first one was more "human" looking), and isn't as Picasso-ey with the weird juxtaposed perspectives.

On the right track?

Offline Dessa

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Re: [WIP]Novice, working on smileys for another board C+C welcome

Reply #13 on: April 29, 2011, 03:29:00 am
Major revision:



Basically I started over from near scratch.  The originals were an amalgam of various reference images, but they weren't built on a solid foundation.  I restarted by sketching on paper the main viewing angles so that I had something I could rotate and reposition easily, then translating those:


I also changed the hair.  Instead of trying to draw straight lines that sometimes merge at oblique angles, now there are fluffy curls that don't need every last pixel in place to look like fluffy curls.  This had the added advantage of fitting into the theme that she assumed early on of sun, clouds, and sky.  As a bonus, "cloudy" hair lets me use the HAIR to help express, as negative emotions can use darker clouds to look "stormy."  And to give credit where it's due, this hair is a lot more along the lines drawn out by my friend.

She also hews more closely to the geometry of the cartoon characters, with some compromises for pixels sakes.

From here, it was easy to conceptualize different expressions.  I was still dead set on yellow as a base color, and on "silver" hair, which don't contrast well, but I added shading to the hair to put darkness against the yellow's light.

Beyond that, the color scheme was tightened to improve contrast, with the primaries used for distinct elements.  Reds, mouth - yellows, face - blues, eyes - greys, hair.

I still need to shade the faces, particularly crying.  Beyond that, I can't see much else to be done here except add to add more expressions.

Edit:  Wow, she looks like a Rabite (from secret of mana).  Unintentional!
« Last Edit: April 29, 2011, 07:08:55 pm by Dessa »