Mushrooms

[A-Red]

Hey all,

I've played around with pixel art before, but I'm trying to get more serious about it.  I made this as an exercise in color palettes and basic lighting.



Thanks for checking it out.  Any critiques will be appreciated.

[jams0988]

Welcome to the forum. These are decent looking, but pretty simple, so they're hard to critique. Have you worked on anything else more complex recently?
For these, the bright blue and red colors don't look good to me; they're burning my eyes. Also, all these mushrooms are very smooth and shiny, so they look like they're made of plastic. Maybe you could try adding some texture to them? Getting rid of the perfectly shaped specular on them would be a good first step, I think.

[A-Red]

Thanks for the crit! Here's a first attempt at adding more of a texture:



Sorry about the bright blue and red.  I know you'd never see a mushroom that color, but I wanted to try different kinds of color ramps and figure out how to color a very saturated object.  Did I completely miss the mark on that, or is it just that the saturation looks funny on a mushroom?

[Kazuya Mochu]

I gave it a go.

mostly what Ive done is actually push the shades closer as a gradiant. In most cases in real light the color doesnt change so gradually that you can have all the colors in the gradient take up the same amount of space.

if you look here, most of the transition between the dark and bright happen on that small transition area, almost like a line.

you could argue that in that case you wouldn't need so many colors. well thats a plus!

I understand what you did is also a matter of style. I'm just giving you another take on it.

[Grimsane]

another exercise that'd be worthwhile would be rendering the mushroom at different sizes, sometimes you'll discover too large and there are too many pixels to clearly define something without more colours, too small and there just isn't enough pixels to define the details, and sometimes you will find a perfect resolution where you can imply details with enough colour and shape information to imply texture

something like this would be on the smallest end of the scale of practical sizes


to further elaborate why I am making this point, if you can do non-pixel art at the same resolution that reads well, then you should question how much purpose there is in doing it in pixels



quick paint over, and the bottom left is rapidly reduced to 13 colours, just to point out, if you plan on having alot of detail, then higher resolutions are of course viable, but keep in mind to consider the resolution, it's always detail Vs amount of pixels/size. one has to justify the other. I think you could depict the same amount of detail in much less pixels, maybe try one at 50%

[A-Red]

Thanks everyone for the critiques on my threads. I'm definitely soaking all this up and taking it to heart, even if I don't continue working on the mushrooms. More stuff soon, if I can find the time!