This is the worst idea I have ever had (WARNING: Anime)

[Helm]

Yes, that's fine. I'll wait for updates before I give any more critique or edits now that I know what you want to do. I feel the direction will have to go towards simplicity/symbolism if readability is still paramount for you, if you want to have a 12-lightsource football field-type uniform brightness going on.

[HughSpectrum]

Looking back on earlier versions where the colors are much darker than they are now and thinking about past lighting conditions I've done (as a side note: I will never dither like that again), I can see where my mistakes and habits have come from in terms of lighting.  I also need to fix a palette that I pull a lot of colors from.

Either way, I think the point is ultimately that a lot of background elements are too strong, and need to be nerfed.



I pushed the two big lights more towards the back, and with the new implied distance I was able to have another light where the close spotlight used to be, to help have something to fill negative space and frame the image.

I'm trying to imply that the grid is sort of glowing without it being distracting.  Unfortunately the shading here might be banding, and I'm not sure what to do about that (I also might not have cleaned up a lot of dirty artifacts that may exist by the grid lines.)

Started adding more colors.  Unfortunately this leads to a lot of colors currently underused as a result, and a lot of straight ramps (but I can adjust the hues later on once a lot of the colors find their uses and I start intermixing ramps).

I also have to apologize, but despite it being better to have warm colors up front, I just love the kind of atmosphere the warmer colors of the holographic backdrop behind the monster has.  Making the castle very light was an accidental decision.

Again, very incomplete and a lot of messy clusters here and there still.

I also want to note: I'll be adding outlines last or close to last, as a sort of cherry on top of a finished cake once I get everything else working.

[Mike]

This is how i would do it.  I've seen this type of scene before in anime.  It's normally at either before the commercial break or at the end of the show.  A sort of omnious bit of either color pencil or water color work.  Anyway what they normally do in this scenario is position the bad guy as this sort of omniscient god like creature.  Positioned above the main characters and larger than life.  Here is an edit I cobbled together.

 It's a bit messy because I don't have my tablet with me so I can't do any sort of skillful edit.  Anyway what I did was made Kaiba bigger and higher in the sky.  As well as lowering the contrast and slightly desaturating him.  Basically blending Kaiba in with the cooler color of the sky.  Also the Blue Eyes White Dragon overlaps with Kaiba that way it's more of an obvious separation from the background.  Also it too is bigger and a bit more saturated.  

Oh and it would be cool if Kaiba was drawn sort of curving inward like he is enveloping the heroes.

Other than that it's look great!  I look forward to the finished piece.

[Mathias]

I dig that edit, Mike. It achieves much more of an epic movie poster sort of composition.

So this is from Yu-Gi-Oh? Haven't seen much of it, but I don't remember seeing the whole TRON-esque virtual grid idea in it before. Is that mandatory here? Or was it maybe a way to make that portion of the scene just easier to draw?
If you want to go with computer generated look/feel for the terrain, you might consider making the floor and maze walls partially clear illuminated glass instead. Would require palette tweaks.

I wouldn't crop the left-most character so much, it minimizes him/her unnecessarily.

[HughSpectrum]

That idea is too good.  I feel like it's almost stealing if I went ahead and enlarged the screen this late in the game.  I think something like that I should try and consider for a future project so I can actually learn from the advice.

@Mathias: I originally didn't intend it to be Tron-like, but I probably overdid it in trying to communicate that environment is a visual display and not a physical object.  It's been awhile since I've actually seen the show, to be honest, so I likely got a lot of things wrong.

[Mike]

I wouldn't consider it stealing.  It's just a suggestion if you think it will work go for it   You would do it much more justice than me.

[HughSpectrum]

Okay...  What I'm probably gonna do later...

1) Say "screw it" and assume the playing board is physical, and the characters will cast shadows over it, and nerf the sci-finess of it.

2) Enlarge the screen (although I won't go for a super dramatic effect).

[Mathias]

Since this project is in such rough WIP state, I recommend going for it, as far as the composition improvement suggested by Mike.

See if you can glean anything from this collection of movie posters.

It's your project, just do what you think is best/feasible to actually finish.

[HughSpectrum]

I caved in and made the screen bigger, but now I'm bitter at how much of an annoyance it was to do.



Since the screen is so much bigger now, I figured it'd be neat to have another screen at a surrounding angle.

Anyway, changed light source (though I'm probably abusing light physics here, I really don't want to bring the light source in view), and other changes I either don't remember or feel like mentioning.

I don't want to make another big change now, I really need to start finishing this up.

[HughSpectrum]

I just outdid my topic title.  THIS is the worst idea I've ever had, and it might actually be in all seriousness.

What I am thinking of attempting is probably bad form, so I'm gonna go ahead and present the idea.  It's something I've been wanting to try for awhile, but is highly inefficient when it comes to color count and the pixel form.



It's a combination of adding an extremely low contrasting shade and dithering to create a super smooth and subtle gradient, because some times I want to add an extremely subtle curve or shading to a surface, but can't do so without drawing too much attention to it.

It's a debate with myself, because it's not pixel information that's necessary or maybe not even useful, and it also begs the question "why not just use another medium that better facilitates such a task"?

There must be something else I can do, because most pixel artists seem to do fine without having to resort to choices like this.