C64 Knight Portrait

[PypeBros]

yum! I can already see the kind of bouncing scroller and hear the SID square wave pulsing here

anatomically speaking, isn't his left shoulder a bit too thin and curiously bending forwards ?

[Facet]

I was just gonna say why so monotone? There's loads of subtle ramps in the palette, you can go a bit mad swapping out greys.

Obviously my exaggerated example isn't nearly 4 colours a cell yet, and er, looking back probably wouldn't work as a talking head, but it's something to think about.

[Jeremy]

Picking up on what Facet said, here's a more colourful edit:

The blue is the global colour, I think it's got 4 colours per 8x8, but I might have missed some spots

Some of the single-pixel details (e.g. the white spot on the neck) could do with smoother transitions. Maybe try to focus on more clusters than vertical lines?
And the inside of the visor is screaming out for more AA!

[AlcopopStar]

@Facet & Jeremy

If this was more of a personal piece rather then a game piece for sure I would go a bit crazier on the colour ramps. Though i'm not sure if i'd be able to pick out ramps quite that good.

I think I'll probably leave the knight alone for now, not because the crits aren't relevant but because I can only work on these for so long.

So here is portrait 2 of 6, from knight to peasant girl.



She is still WIP, her torso and hat especially. But I'd love to get some more feedback on her. Thanks again for all the great responses so far!

[ErekT]

Both of them look great I think. I tried a little edit to make the knight's chin more square and the girl's eyebrows a bit less prominent, along with some other stuff. Didn't pay much attention to the c64 limits.

[Ryumaru]

Just wanted to say that the peasant girl has some really sharp pixeling. Very nice expression with some very hardcore limitations. 

[Helm]

So, first of all, that's a lovely expression on the girl, very alive and human. That's more than a lot of people ever achieve, so congrats just on that level. My main piece of advice would be to scale back a lot on the dithering, and only use it as a tapered end to a brush-stroke.



Really think about what you're achieving with dithering, and what you're sacrificing to get it. Also not a big fan of grey highlights but eh, this is the c64 palette and that's what you have to work with, I'd just make them significantly smaller and stylized.

[ptoing]

Strongly agree with Helm on the dither. The more I do pixelart, the less I use dither. I would say as a rule of thumb, if you are dithering, chances are that the texture you want to convey can be achieved better without dither. And I think you will agree with this if you look at what Helm did esp on the hair and cloth.

Great stuff though, looking forward to where this is going.

[AlcopopStar]

I actually very much agree with your points on dithering. Ever since I returned to pixeling it's been something i've been more or less avoiding. My general ethos toward painting is to avoid rendering forms and more attempt to imply them (if that makes sense :s). I don't feel like dithering in general is particularly conducive to that form of shading.

That said I was in some what of a bind as to how to make that limited pallet work with this one, and I figured dithering to be the answer, fortunately helm has shown a really elegant way of handling the shading, something I tried my best to emulate in this edit;



There is still some dither in there, but I have tried to keep it marginal and can reduce it further if need be. Thanks again for all the wonderful comments. I am learning a world of stuff.

edit:
I was worried the harsh lighting might have ruined the nuance of the expression somewhat, so I added some quick variants. Which works the best? I honestly can't tell :x

[Jeremy]

[...]Though i'm not sure if i'd be able to pick out ramps quite that good.

With metal like that, you could probably choose any ramp with a decent range of values and have it work ok

here is a little edit of the face, particularly pay attention to the jawline - I turned the brown outline into AA. I think with stuff like that you're not taking note of widepixels' unique challenges; it would look fine if you were working at a normal aspect ratio but here it's kinda bandy.

The other changes are basically to my preferences, but I do think the mouth is a bit too far to the left. My edit addresses that somewhat, but it might be a bit twisted now


I don't know how you'd deal with the largest neck highlight but it's super fuzzy atm.