Feature 10 - I Move For No Man

[wolfenoctis]

Good point about the knees Larwick, thanks 

[Wanyo]

"Let's call it a draw!"
The orange & red still bother me, instead of drawing your eye to the focal point it ends up pulling your attention to those red lines.

When you say poster I assume you mean like a screenprinted concert poster, maybe you could really desaturate or soften the red/orange to match that sort of style? I'm at work at the moment or I'd toss an edit but this is the kind of thing I was thinking of:
http://images.cdn.bigcartel.com/bigcartel/product_images/96879127/max_h-1000+max_w-1000/Marmozets_Screenadelica_Poster.jpg

Looking at this and all those posters really makes me want to do something screenprinted like that!

[wolfenoctis]

Good point Wanyo, I subdued the color a bit:

[wolfenoctis]

Moving on to AA:


Any critique specifically on AA?

[Larwick]

I'd suggest studying Panda's work if you haven't already.

You may also want to remove all that dithering - make a proper texture instead when you're ready. At the moment it distracts. You'll want more colors to blend the darkest blue's edges against the light orange, since they're so far apart in both lightness and hue.

[Reo]

I'd suggest studying Panda's work if you haven't already.

You may also want to remove all that dithering - make a proper texture instead when you're ready. At the moment it distracts. You'll want more colors to blend the darkest blue's edges against the light orange, since they're so far apart in both lightness and hue.

I'd say that if you're going to use dithering keep it to the parts that are chainmail. It works perfectly as texture for that in the area under the helm, but the fact that the only part it's reused on is the ''skirt'' causes that to come off as chainmail as well.

[Cyangmou]

I personally think that Panda overAA's a lot of things which makes it look unnecessary blurry in a lot of spots - I think on of the nicest lookings characteristics of pixel art is if it's sharp and if there is just enough AA to smoothen out jaggy curves.

Given to the placative look of the art, I'd also say that one midtone between to colors is enough.

For example I see that you used 3 colors for AAing the red while the one which is the brightest seems to be a halftone and the other 2 are between halftone and full red, which is unbalanced.

THe red to purple red you used here and there is also by far closer to the actual red than to the purple.

If you use unbalanced steps you rather blur the art instead of smoothing it.

[PixelPiledriver]

I feel like the lettering is more fun to look at with the aa as the orange and red re-used.
It would remove a couple colors too.
Not sure if it's actually better, but something to try.


Just a quick color replace.
Could look better to swap the red with orange in areas that the red carves too deeply, such as the top right of the 'S' in 'Shall'.

[Pix3M]

Here's what I think. Quite a difference, rite? 

Also, you have to be very careful with AA especially if your monitor's colors aren't great. That said, your art can look jagged on other people's monitors and manual AA is prone to not being very accurate. You could do some homework on what mathematically-correct AA should look like. I think Ai should be able to weigh in if he wants to mess around with his color-space wizardry.

[wolfenoctis]

Thank you for all the critiques. I have made some changes as the original is quite dull, tried to make it a bit more interesting to look at. The lines are a little rough at the moment, I'll fix that, but any critique on the changes would be appreciated:


@ Larwick:  I will also be attempting some textures for chainmail soon, thanks for the advice 

@ Pix3m: No doubt about it, yours is superior. You wouldn't by chance have a link or two lying about that explain mathematically correct AA would you? How did you do yours? Thank you for your edit 

@ Cyangmou: thank you for your thoughts, I do think a crisp sharp image is more desirable