[WIP] Self-Portrait & ARPG Main Character Sprite

[jams0988]

New one's much better, wex. And Atnas' edit is also an improvement, especially her left leg. The little one pixel gap between the top of her shoe and her hand really make the curve of her body much more obvious.
And is it a rule that pixel art should be totally readable at 1x all the time, even if it's meant to be viewed at 2x? I've kind've been saying "ah, it looks fine at 2x, though!" for some of my pixel art recently...should I be making sure everything's totally readable at its native resolution, too?

Edit: Wex posted right before I did. Yeah, sadly, I thought she was wearing pants, hence the reason I thought her leg was shaped funny in yours. You might wanna pull her skirt up one more pixel, and brighten it up a bit to make it more obvious what it was. I thought the black socks(?) were just shaded regions on her green pants.

[tehwexxl0rz]

Thanks, jams. Hopefully this clears things up?



With regards to your question, I'd say absolutely yes. If it's not readable at native resolution, then the viewer is doing too much work to decipher the image at 2x.

[jams0988]

Thanks for answering my question, wex. I'll have to work harder on making things readable from now on. XD
For the latest edit, it looks like she could either be wearing a green undershirt, or an apron-type thing like you mentioned. It's still a little ambiguous, but I don't think you're going to be able to make it much more obvious with so few pixels to work with...I'm assuming your game is going to have portraits in it, right? It'll probably be fine as long as you show a full-sized portrait of her, or mention what she's wearing.

It might help if you lightened up her pants/got rid of that extra green pixel where her skirt meets in the middle. That could make it more obvious the skirt was splitting to the sides.

[tehwexxl0rz]

Thanks, I removed the extra pixel as you suggested and it looks good.
The game was planned to have hi-res animations for cutscenes, but the perspective of the game has actually changed, so I'll have to create a new player sprite anyway. I'm still happy with how this turned out though, and I hope I'll be able to use it in a future project....



Started shading the hair on the self-portrait:

[EvilEye]

It's just... too dark over his right eye. Look at all those black lines, just put an eyepatch on him and have done with it! You can't distinguish any of that detail anyway and it looks messy.

And I think you're overshading the hair. Each strand is banded practically, it makes it look like he's got big chunky hairs coming out of his head.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnd.... I don't like the dithering. This is an example of bad dithering IMO. It makes the surface of his skin look really rough. The colors are too far apart for it not to look textured. Get some intermediary colors and bridge the gap, and mix up the hue a little. See my Secret Santa gift for an example of awesome dithering 

The eye is pretty good.

There is way to much brown. Even if you have brown hair it's not that evenly brown everywhere, looks a bit drab.

I'm too tired to think of anything else.

[tehwexxl0rz]

Thanks for the feedback, EvilEye. Although I must admit I'm a bit perplexed by some of it...

I can clearly distinguish the detail in the hair over the eye and it doesn't look too dark to me.
I hardly see any banding in the hair, but maybe we're using different definitions?

I can hue-shift the hair a bit more, but still, I don't really understand the complaint "too much brown."

If you can find the time to do an edit, I think that would clear things up....

[EvilEye]

Howabout this:



More depth + more engaging colors. Still pretty rough though.

I recorded the editing too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuwU9i_eZ1g

[Sharm]

Can't say I agree with your edit, EvilEye.  It's a good start on a different piece, but the style is too different from the original.  I agree with a lot of the advice though.



I made an attempt at an edit, though I think a little more attention needs to be paid to the wonderful one done by Atnas.  It addresses a lot of the things EvilEye was talking about including fixing the clumpy hair, good dithering and less contrast in the colors for the skin.  BTW, by clumpy hair, I mean that the middle where the light shines should have less definition of locks.  Take a look at your hair in the mirror and pay attention to the way the shine takes out all the individualism from the hairs.  What's been bugging me is that the hair shaded like that towards the end would be constantly poking him in the eye.  I brought it out a little so it's sitting on top instead and tried to make the hair's shading more consistent with the skin's light source.

[Stone_Merten]

I think I see the problem... the left side of the hair is a little flat shading wise. Flesh out the shading and it should poof a bit more completing the style. You don't have to take this rookie's advice but its someting to consider

Other wise great picture!