GR#108 - Wangsta Chick - Sprite Process

[Grimsane]

great visual assistance Cyangmou, and nice perseverance and eagerness to improve Bissle

one thing I've noticed by looking at not only this but your recent work is a need for improvement in limbs mostly, I hope you don't mind pulling another older work in here to show some suggestions and visual critique.
edit:


the arm is the major issue there, and it was present on the majority of the animations frames, and personally that leg angle looked extremely awkward to me, anatomically plausible maybe, but yeah there's some suggestions, whilst not perfect hopefully it illustrates some areas I think you should concentrate on and think more about.

here's a quick edit on top of Cyangmou's rebalance adjustment


some tips and suggestions on how to tackle the limbs, a trick would be to add wrap around accessories, bands etc to the arms or legs to reinforce the direction they are flowing, it's a common used method and it works, it's especially hard to capture foreshortening effectively and harder still in pixel art and art that has stylistic emphasis on it's 2D nature, and pixel art in particular

also she looks as though she has no panties or any garments at all under the Jersey so the short tights is another suggestion and would help reinforce the volume of the legs

also one thing in particular I've noticed is the knee definition or rather a lack of, reference


it helps to reinforce the angularity even if subtly on the knees, at the moment they are almost depicting nothing more than bends in a cylinder that would be the legs, and I didn't do much work on the arms but I think the rear (her left) needs quite a bit of adjustment

hopefully this is helpful keep at it

[PixelPiledriver]

Using Cyangmou's video ref I came up with this:


The unexpected thing about it is that making his top half lean back actually makes him appear MORE balanced, which is contrary to how i would think about it in my mind.
But when I tried this pose physically I realized why.
Sure hes leaning back, but really hes pushing his hips forward.
Feeling it out this puts alot of pressure on the pelvis and abs.
The top half of the body is basically "hanging" from the lower half, which is doing all the work to hold this guy up.

I found this interesting so I thought about it some more.
The generic center of gravity in the body is relatively low, and even lower in women.
It seems that keeping the upper body vertical or leaning forward can be associated with sitting down, which is why it feels like she is falling over.
When we go to sit down we lead with our ass and lean foreword, using the low center of gravity to gravitate us to the chair.
The opposite happens if we were to notice a thumbtack on the chair, the upper half leans back and we lead with the hips forward gravitating away from the chair:


Of course these are exaggerations, but in art that's a good thing.
Really these could be even more exaggerated and work just fine.
Especially as part of an animation.

I'd like to do an edit but don't have the time at the moment.
Cool design.
With some more work you'll end up with something really nice.

[Bissle]

I didn't want to post again until I had made some progress... and then decided that's gonna take too long and posted anyway.

@Grimsame: Thank you for addressing the recurring problem I have with limbs. As far as her outfit, I guess I should explain what I'm doing. Ultimately, this lady is a parody of this character from the 90s RPG Xenogears--a soldier(!!) who walks around in a minidress with slits on the side and pantyhose (really, Square?)--as a gangsta rapper. Women wearing sport jerseys as dresses, or "jersey dresses" (fortunately for the design, unfortunately for my eyes back in the day) was a style in hip hop circles about 10 years ago. Giving her leggings is something I would do otherwise, but it would take away from what I'm going for. I actually tried to lengthen the jersey dress itself, but it ended up leaving so much empty space, I'd either have to  lengthen the medallion (which I ended up doing anyway to a lesser extent), or add more "pizazz"to the jersey itself, which I don't want to do for a lot of reasons. And the no-pants look makes her look more trashy, which is a plus.   

@PixelPiledriver: Really, really helpful; when I get to animation, I will use that as a reference! I could see what you did actually working as a tutorial *hint* *hint*.



Despite it not really showing, I've been driving myself crazy trying to work on this. I eventually gave up trying to modify the pose as it was, so I went ahead and widened her stance, which hopefully makes balance less of an issue; I'm hoping it's not another bow-legged mess like that old sprite Grimsane pointed out. I added more definition to her legs. Reduced color count from 47 to somewhere in the mid-30s. Did away with a lot of the excessive selout. Did some tentative work on the arms to make them look more natural. Changed the facial expression from "look at me, I'm all hardcore!!"  to something I hope comes off as something between high and smug. In the process of making footwear leather zip-up boots like in the concept art.

Now I can sleep! Yes...! ... yes!

[Grimsane]

completely different dynamic (and therefore persona) now,
i find the face hard to immediately read, at glance her mouth looks more like a band-aid so it takes a moment of staring to pick up on the expression,
and I think the pink strip of pixels (rosy cheeks?) is a bit disruptive to the overall readability of the face, and to me the left leg looks quite awkward almost dislocated from her hips relative to her other leg position

I might add the dynamic you had before leaned toward implying she was in the middle of a kinetic activity like break-dancing and general hyperactive hip-hoppery now she  leaning toward implying she's a tough no nonsense bitch

and those boots  if you're pushing her trashiness more so I guess it's a step in the right direction, keep persevering 

O-T: oh damn I just acquired Xenogears awhile ago and haven't got around to playing it, always wanted to get it when I was younger after seeing it in magazines, I got a game to play 

[Bissle]

Hey, who says she can't be both?   I'm going to go back to something approaching my original idea when I get to the point of animation, but having been recommended a more static pose to start with, this will suffice; it'll certainly help me perfect what I'm trying to do before I proceed to anything more complicated.

Hmm, by left leg, do you mean her left leg, or the left leg from our view (her right, the one I changed a lot). Whether a sign of an easily swayed mind or poor anatomy, I now look at both legs and can see how either one could appear dislocated.

What could I do to make the facial features more clear? Lachie Dazdarian brought that up early on, and her face being hard to read bothers me more than anything honestly. More contrast in her complexion? Extra color to add more volume? Get rid of the blunt? Quit trying to fit detail into 16 pixels?

I forgot to mention I did follow your suggestion in adding arm accessories; the yellow thing is eventually going to be a tattoo. As of what I'm working on right now, it's purple (not trying to increase the color count again).

O-T: Nice! I totally recommend you play it. It's very much a love it or hate it game. I think it had a lot of potential, but ultimately I think the plot was one not suited for a video game. Despite what I wrote earlier, this lady was created from a twisted form of what could be called love.  

[Grimsane]

I meant the barely touched one, her left.

rough edit with some suggestions


one way to keep the blunt and add to the readability of the face, and save your smoke effect 

I think the face is well done readability aside.

and I recognized the arm feature instantly wondered if it was jewelry or what though being gold n all.

[Bissle]

I did fix the legs shortly after Grimsane's update. I tried having her hold her cigarette, but honestly, I didn't want her hands to be occupied--I want gang signs!   I made the actual blunt much longer so that it distracts less from he face while still allowing me to keep the smoke effect. I ended up redoing the arms, as well:



Before I got to flesh out the gang signs and the boots, I just... more or less got bored with the pose and decided to try again from scratch, based partially on PixelPiledriver's  observations, with her upper body leaning back and lower body trying to achieve balance:



Just a rough blob of pixels that will be fleshed out once I make up my mind. I got an opinion from someone to the effect that my first pose was ultimately more characterful. Any thoughts?

[Tourist]

In every image except the very first, her spine is vertical and her shoulders are level.  This pretty much drives her hips to be level too, although the torso could still twist.  Add in basic balance and you end up with a fairly static pose.  Works fine for a model sheet, not so good for in-game if she is meant to be a hip-hop dancer.

The newest 'blob' image improves on the stiff back, but the balance fails in the same way as previous images.  All the weight is coming down on one leg, on the toes, and the longer leg is just kind of hanging out there.  Yet the hips are level.  Compare the position of the feet to where they are in PixelPiledriver's image.  The leading foot in his image (shorter leg in your image) is out in front of the hips, not underneath.

If the was a tweener and she was pivoting her longer leg around behind the shorter one then you could get away with it, but even then the hips probably aren't going to stay level for more than a frame.  Or if she was in the middle of stumbling forward.  But otherwise fix the pose before adding any more detail.  Keep a curve in the spine, just improve the distribution of mass.

Tourist

Edit: didn't mean to sound quite so harsh.  I think you've got a solid character design and I like how you've done the hair.  The dynamic pose is better.  But I see a recurring problem with balance and positioning the legs.  I don't have a good solution.  Maybe try some gesture sketches on paper?

[PixelPiledriver]

I'm not suggesting you get rid of the eye necklace by not drawing it.
Just didn't get to it.
Will edit in more text later.

[Bissle]

As I told you before, *amazing* take on her, PixelPiledriver! You got her character down! You made the purple leggings/hose look pretty good, I was this close to adding them myself. Really the only thing stopping me is I already have a character wearing leggings and I don't want the designs to seem redundant. I love that lighter--makes me think of a firecracker. My favorite part in the process was the one with the smoke spelling "Yo". Thank you!

I have to head to work, like, right now, but wanted to post this before going. I'll add more details to this post when I have time.



EDIT: OK, have some time. Before I saw that edit, I was making it look like the one with the blue line indicating balance and center of mass... I was just going to post some progress when I saw it, and I thought, "I have to work on this some more", and after a few days of ruminating I came up with the above. The shadow was last minute, and I didn't redo the chain, so they don't mesh too well currently. I noticed that I had made her hair big to the point where combined with the hat, it added something like 3-4 inches to her height,  so I reduced the top some.

As it is going to have animations, all of the previous versions and all the edits will be factored in when I get to animating. I can't let that blunt and the smoke effect go unused.  

I don't consider this finished to 100% satisfaction, but with the exception of the fingerless gloves it is pretty much fully rendered and I want to work on something else. I have a whole lot of WIPs that I am going to post here when I am able.