[wip] Bilou's school : Pendats goes marchin' in [c+c]

[Helm]

This is a smaller palette, but no effort has been made by me to unify it, just cleaning it up and pushing brightness/contrast. Does it help?

The biggest problem with your art is bad texturing, at this point, I'll return with specific edit and critique.

[PypeBros]

This is a smaller palette, but no effort has been made by me to unify it, just cleaning it up and pushing brightness/contrast. Does it help?

That's the kind of fearless alternate I'm after, yes. Feel free to replace sprites with one-shade silouhetto if the overall colour count is already too high for other colour edits.

The biggest problem with your art is bad texturing, at this point, I'll return with specific edit and critique.

Ah. Well, that's not much of a surprise: it came out with quite much pain. I look forward for your advice.

[Helm]

Okay,

1. is your book.

2. is the form broken down to its block shape.

3. is geometry, lit from above more or less. If a thing doesn't look good and identifiable on this stage, it won't look much better if you overrender it.

4. here I apply more detailed geometry, I still don't need more colors or fancy tricks, I don't need to fake texture, it's just stuff that the book can support. I also looked at reference here [ http://futureblue.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/books1.jpg ] which you should always do, no matter how cartoony what you're trying to draw is. You can spot many differences from 3 to 4 that are related to the reference.

5. After the shapes are good, identifiable and the object has volume, you can go nuts with your new school colors and tints and whatever else, it's all embellishment from here and on. 

[PypeBros]

-- (later) -->
I started from step 2 and tried to apply steps 3 and 4 with the geometry I try to achieve (rounded cover, with slight bumps at each edge, due to the seams -- see profile shape on the left). I may still have the second version try to fix some remaining errors with step 4. I also kept my original colour for the paper (I try to make the book look old, with yellow-ish paper), but if you switched to white-and-cyan for a purpose, I'd be curious to know.

As for step 5, I must admit that I don't get the process through which you picked those pink/cyan tints you have used ... But seen at 1x, you managed to have something much convincing for the shadow on the paper than what I ever got. If there's a rationale / tutorial about this, I'm curious as well.

meanwhile, I took a quite opposite approach to colour harmony by making a miniature of the scene and try to "zoom & refine" it progressively. So far, it brings this:
<-new test | for ref->

It's easier for me to experiment other tints ... although I still stay much more "conventional" compared to the color revamp you made.

edit: more book references

[Helm]

Yeah the tints themselves in my edit don't matter much, just my kinks showing. Your latest book is much better in my opinion. Rounded edges is fine but you could use another color just to buffer the yellow highlight on the red main color, but don't overdo it, don't make it too noisy, just keep the shapes. Try to think of it like this, use the 4-5 main colors for the object's volumes, and then put in-between colors from the value jumps that are used in a secondary way. Of course there'll be places where you'll feel it natural later on to reuse of of your secondary colors as a primary volume color, but you'll get an intuitive feel for when and how to do this.

[PypeBros]

@helm: okay, thank you for your guidelines. I'll "polish" the book tonight and give the "wooden block" a revamp asap.

edit: polished -- except the "paper" part which still need a bit more love. I might also need to revise the left corner a little bit: it looks like it's not following the shape suggested by those rounded lines on the cover >_<

[Helm]

much, much better. Wouldn't surprise me to see this piece in any professional good looking mega drive game of the era. Approach all real-life related items you render in a similar way, avoid 'noisy textures' for their own sakes and you will level up in your craft.

[PypeBros]

The first try of a real-sized wood block that uses the colours defined with the "minitature level" experiment. Hope the volume is correct.
See top post for a full-size level mock-up. Now, let's proceed with anti-aliasing, refine the texture details and avoid boring pattern repetition...

note: background here is not definitive. That's merely a colour test with a simplified pattern.
Btw, it's a mix of techniques found in zool, coolspot and SMB3, if that matters. I tried to grasp and apply the best of each.

[PypeBros]

2 foreground alternatives, 2 background alternatives. Is there any combination that looks the best in your eyes ?

[Sharm]

#4 looks best to me.  The wood looks more like wood and the background doesn't look greyed out.